THE REGISTER OF WEATHER

Being Forty-One Years of Daily Observation in a Realm Which Has Two Kinds of Weather, Kept by a Man Who Is Aware of How That Sounds and Has Continued Regardless.

Compiled at the gauge behind the Murk Gate by Japhet Trapp, Observer (Weather), by appointment, at a stipend the Office describes as nominal and which the Observer describes, in his own hand, in the margin of the 1889 volume, as "correct."

THE OBSERVER'S PREFACE, WHICH HE HAS REWRITTEN ONCE IN FORTY-ONE YEARS

The weather in Sogmarsh has two opinions. It is damp, or it is more so.

I am aware that this is the joke. I have heard it from every visitor to this gauge for forty-one years, usually within the first minute, usually with the air of a man who has just thought of it. I have developed a face for it. The face says yes, very good, and behind the face I am counting, because the gauge does not stop while a gentleman is being amusing.

So let me put my position at the front of my own book, once, and then get on.

The joke is correct. It is also the least interesting true thing about this subject. Yes: it rains here, and then it rains differently. Two states. A child could keep this register and several have covered for me and done it well. What forty-one years of standing at a gauge in a realm with two kinds of weather has taught me is this — and I would ask the reader who came for the joke to stay for the sentence, because it took me nineteen years to arrive at it and about four seconds to write down:

Where there are only two states, everything that matters is in the timing.

Not whether. Never whether. It will rain. It is going to rain on your harvest, your wedding, your funeral and your roof, and no observation of mine has ever altered that or ever will. But when, and for how long, and — the whole of my profession, the thing I am actually for — whether there is a gap on Thursday.

That is my trade. I am not a prophet of rain. Anybody can prophesy rain here and eleven people do it in every taproom. I am a man who tells a parish where the gaps are, and a gap of four hours in the right place is a hay crop, and I have got it right often enough that they keep paying me nominally.

Each entry: The Sign · What It Is Held To Mean · What Forty-One Years Say. The third column is the book. The first two are why nobody reads it.

1 · THE GREY THAT COMES UP FROM THE GROUND

The Sign. In the hour before dawn, the grey rises out of the fields rather than coming down from the sky. Every soul in this realm knows it and will point it out to you.

What It Is Held To Mean. Three days of wet.

What Forty-One Years Say. It means the ground is warmer than the air, which happens after a wet night and before a dry morning, and it is followed by rain within three days on fifty-one occasions in a hundred, which is to say it means nothing whatsoever and is exactly as useful as a coin.

I published this in my eleventh year. It was received badly. A man at Drudgeford market told me to my face that his grandmother had known the grey and I said that I was sure she had and that she had been right about half the time, and he has not spoken to me since, and I record here that I was correct and that I handled it like a fool. A true finding delivered to a man about his grandmother is not a finding. It is an insult with arithmetic on it, and I have been more careful since and got more done.

2 · THE WEATHER BEFORE A FAIR

The Sign. It is always foul on the day of the Mucklecombe fair.

What It Is Held To Mean. That the fair is cursed, or that the parish chose the date badly, or (the Loafian position) that somebody has not been generous enough.

What Forty-One Years Say. In forty-one fairs it has been foul on twenty-two and fair on nineteen, which is a coin again.

But here is what I did not expect and what makes this the entry I am proudest of: on the nineteen fair days, nobody remembers it. I have asked. I have asked people who were there, standing in sunshine, eating a pie — and eleven of them told me, unprompted, that it always rains on the fair. The parish is not lying and it is not stupid. It is remembering the wet ones, because the wet ones are the ones that cost something.

I have come to think that most of what this realm calls a sign is that: not a superstition, but a perfectly sound memory of the times it went badly, carried by people for whom going badly is expensive and going well is only Tuesday.

3 · THE THURSDAY GAP

The Sign. None. That is the point of this entry.

What It Is Held To Mean. —

What Forty-One Years Say. There is, in this valley, in most weeks between Sog and Dust, a gap of between three and six hours, most often on a Thursday, of which no folk-sign I have ever collected takes the slightest notice.

It is caused by nothing anybody can see from the ground. I found it in my nineteenth year by doing the thing nobody does with a weather register, which is reading it backwards — I stopped writing down what happened and went back and counted what had.

That gap has, since I began publishing it on a slate at the Murk Gate on Wednesday evenings, been used to get in hay, mend roofs, move stock, bury people, and hold two weddings. The Office does not regard this as a finding, because it is not a prediction of rain and the establishment is for Observer (Weather).

It is the only useful thing I have done and it is not in my job description.

4 · THE BOG DOES NOT CARE WHAT THE SKY DOES

The Sign. Farmers watch the sky. Fen-men watch the ground.

What It Is Held To Mean. That fen-men are contrary.

What Forty-One Years Say. That fen-men are right and I was slow. The water in this realm arrives from the sky and leaves through the ground, and the ground takes weeks about it. A dry fortnight in a wet month is drier at the top and wetter underneath, and the man who trusts the sky drowns his cart in the third week of a drought.

I keep two gauges now. The Office pays for one. The second is a stick in the low pasture that I read every morning, and it has been more use than the instrument, and it cost nothing, and I did not think of it — a peat-cutter did, in a taproom, out of pity, while being polite about my grandmother entry.

5 · THE YEAR THE CROP FAILED

The Sign. —

What It Is Held To Mean. —

What Forty-One Years Say. I saw it coming. I want that written down once, plainly, in my own book, because I have never said it out loud and I am not going to.

The Wet came early and did not lift, and by the fourth week I had the figures and I knew what they meant for anything in the ground, and I put it on the slate at the Murk Gate as I put everything, and I went and told three people who I thought might listen.

Nothing whatever happened. Not because anybody was foolish or cruel: because there is no arrangement in this realm for acting on a thing a man has seen in a column of figures. There is an arrangement for tithes, and an arrangement for the harvest, and an arrangement for burying people afterwards, and none at all for the fortnight in between when it could still have been half-prevented.

My whole profession is the study of what is coming. The realm has no office for what is coming. It has several excellent offices for what has happened.

THE OBSERVER'S CLOSING NOTE

Forty-one years. Two kinds of weather. Fifteen thousand mornings at a gauge behind a wet gate.

I am aware of how it sounds. I have made my peace with how it sounds — but I will set down for whoever has this book after me the one thing I would want them to have on their first morning, when the joke is still funny and the stipend is still nominal:

A place with only two states is not a place with nothing to learn. It is a place where everything worth knowing has been driven into the timing, and the timing is invisible, and nobody will thank you for it.

Watch the ground, not the sky. Read your register backwards. Publish the gaps, not the rain. And when you find that the parish is wrong about the fair, be very careful how you tell them, because they are not wrong about the cost, and the cost is what they are actually remembering, and they have been keeping that account correctly for six hundred years without a single instrument.

— J. Trapp, Observer (Weather), at the gauge, in the wet, as ever.