Lord T'underin'

One of the best adverts that has been on TV in recent times - and I have a feeling I've mentioned it before - is one where a salesman is showing a car to a potential customer and the dialogue is all in a Newfoundland patois. The 'English' subtitles appear at the bottom. All that is except the last line when the customer says,
'I'll take it,' and the Newfoundland line comes up in the subtitles. I hope they make more of these it's such a wonderful ad. The exclamation that the actors use is 'Lord T'underin'.'

Now it seems that in Newfoundland, whether or not the Lord thunders, the sky does. Not so much here on the west coast.
I miss that. In fact we don't really have much in the way of weather and I do like a bit of weather, me.

Before I came to live here, people used to ask me what the weather was like in Vancouver and I would reply that it was much the same as in the south of England. But I was wrong. The climate is much the same, but the weather is a different bowl of porridge.
Over the past year we have had sunny and we have had rainy, and a couple of times we had a sprinkling of snow. But I miss the great rolling thunderstorms, the gales, the hail and the deep fog. I miss being able to look at the sky in the morning and knowing pretty much what the weather is going to do, or notice a certain quality of sheen on the road and know that snow is coming.
Then there are the messages in the British Isles that nature gives you. A good crop of berries on the holly in the autumn signalling a harsh winter, the cows kneeling down, the gulls coming inland.

And yet I'm sure those same signs are here, or rather different ones, but I have missed out on a childhood's worth of learning the code. The magnificence of nature here cannot possibly hold no clues. I just need to listen and be taught by it.
And I'm oh so willing to learn.