Contrasts

The last two months have been full of contrasts:

From the long, sandy beaches of Serifos

to the rugged, wild, imposing, desolate rocky countryside of the Cyclades,

to the wild beauty of Ikaria

to the lush, quiet beauty of Warwickshire's countryside and parks.





We are back in the U.K., and it's taking us a while to get acclimatised to the change.

We've also had unexpected contrasts in the weather. Greece was cool after the sweltering, humid heat in the U.K. in July, a welcome change. We had a very gentle, pleasant time in Greece, with no major heatwaves (a first) with average temperatures of around 32oC. By contrast, Britain was boiling in unprecedented hot temperatures - a sure sign of global warming that is resulting in unpredictable weather patterns. Our gentle, pleasant summer in Greece was violently interrupted in the second week of September when we had unprecedented high winds that made everything rattle, furniture being thrown about on our terrace, huge walls of water beating against the promenades and quays on the beaches and harbours. Then cyclone Zorba arrived, followed by three days of uninterrupted torrential rain. It was a relief coming back to the U.K. where we were greeted with mild temperatures and sunshine.





The new UN report on the climate crisis which shows that even half a degree of extra warming will affect hundreds of millions of people and intensify heat extremes, needs to be heeded, otherwise the world as we know it will cease to exist. According to the Guardian yesterday,  'climate change is an existential threat to the human race...the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that there are only a dozen or so years in which to change our economies radically if we are to keep the effects of the warming already under way to manageable proportions'.