Spring
Spring Festival, starting with Chinese New Year’s Day on Thursday the 19th, is particularly late kicking off this year. In fact, it is as late as it can be – almost – in 1985 it was February 20th, which is the absolute latest.
The advantage of this lateness is that, for once, Spring Festival is turning up in what feels like spring, instead of the usual mid-winter.
I don’t know. Maybe the calendar is out of synch or something. Spring Festival is usually in winter and Mid-Autumn Festival seems to be in high summer.
That said it has been an unusually mild February. It is usually the coldest month, but temperatures have been hovering around the low 20ºC* mark for the last week or so. The forecast for New Year’s Day is a high of 22ºC/low 16ºC but raining.
It is, as spring always is, rather wet even when it isn’t raining, but at least not freezing wet this time.
Global warming, I guess.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the weather will not change. It just takes the wind to change direction and we could plummet back to single figure temperatures, but overall I have noticed a decided tendency for winters to be much warmer than in the past (on average).
2008 bucked the trend, bringing the worst winter in living memory. It was quickly dubbed the “China Snow Disaster”. Unfortunately, my father died on February 7th, 2008, which was New Year’s Day. He had been sick for some time. Sadly, I was unable to return to the UK for the funeral as all transport in China had ground to a halt. No trains. No planes. Millions stranded in stations and airports.
My family understood, but I still feel bad.
*Do your own conversion. I live in the 21st Century and so, am metric!
