Quite!!!! We are just returning home from a lovely break in Deeside.... the leaf colours were glorious....today has been quite gloomy, but colours were still glorious...As I said in a pm to Doctomog ....anyone who lives in this part of the world has an awful lot of stunning countryside on their doorstep....it was our first trip to Ballater and Braamar.... absolutely beautiful ...if I knew how to, I'd post some pictures of Loch Muich...stunning!
Countryside that you barely get to see or enjoy when you are stuck indoors working all week and the weekends are always crap There was no colour to be seen on Deeside when I was there 2 weeks ago but I did notice more in the way of colour appearing in Aberdeen on Monday.
However I've barely been able to leave the house since then due to more ludicrously awful weather. Only managed to get out for a walk at 5pm on Wednesday and Thursday when it was practically dark already. A total of 25 minutes sunshine in 4 days
Given how utterly vile the past week has been it would be a tough ask for the weekend to turn out worse but by the looks of things outside that is exactly what's happened yet again
Yet another write-off weekend day of thoroughly unpleasant soul destroying rain, gloom and SE'ly winds
The worst run of weekends I can ever remember just gets more and more disgusting. It's beyond surreal.
Never has good weather been needed more than over the past 17 months but instead it has brought the most sustained period of utterly diabolical weather I have ever been subjected to. These months have all been ridiculously wet and/or dull:
June 2020
August 2020
October 2020
December 2020
January 2021
May 2021
August 2021
October 2021
At the same time really only 2 good months - September 2020 and June 2021 plus the week of snow in February and the brief heatwave in July. Everything else total garbage.
This month has to be the worst of the lot. A torturous endurance test for the incessant rain, cloudy mild grot and grotesque weekends. Last October was the pits and the 5th wettest in 160 years so I didn't think it was even possible for this one to be even worse. Rain total has been lower but there have been more rain days, a higher rain duration, less sun and worse weekends.
October is supposed to be the month that sees the most cooling from start to finish but yet again we have endured the same dire temperatures throughout. Instead of seeing the first frosts we ended up with stinking double digit minima which increased in frequency as the month wore on with the majority coming after the 17th
I would imagine a list of the top 20 worst Octobers in the past 160 years could primarily consist of 21st Century Octobers. Certainly 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2020 and 2021 all deserve to be on it. It's the month that's changed the most. No longer do we see the last warm, sunny days of the year or the first frosts. Just endless cloudy, mild, soggy muck and, despite rainfall increasing by a third, we hardly ever see gales/storms any more. Just this hideous, murky wet tropical maritime air advected over us on a sickening SE'ly flow. Nothing I detest more
Aberdeen: The only place that misses out on everything
2023 - The Year that's Constantly Worse than a Bad November