LAST week’s inclement weather was a stark reminder that the sea-son of mists and mellow fruitfulness is almost upon us.

At times there was a distinct autumnal feel in the air as a ‘Beijing smog’ hung resolutely over the Island for five consecutive days. Like passengers on a becalmed ship, we had no choice but to draw on the reserves of the famous dogged British spirit.

There’s one thing a good old British summer of rain, grey skies and below average temperatures does: it brings out our famous determination to make the most of a bad situation. After all, short of spraying cement dust above the clouds, as the Soviets used to do to ensure that nothing rained on Red Square parades, when the weather takes agin us we have to grin and not bare it on the beaches.

The dull, grey, monotonous atmosphere was not helped by repetitive weather forecasts, broadcast locally and nationally day after day, optimistically predicting sunny periods for the afternoons or evenings.
These bright interludes were few and far between and very localised. I discovered one at White Rock on Tuesday, but it rapidly drifted west to Egypt.

I have no recollection of being bathed in a ray or two the following day, but to my brief joy I felt the sun’s warm glow on my back in Rozel at around Thursday lunchtime. All the same, that fleeting sensation may have been a figment of my imagination. When I turned round, it had gone.

By late Friday afternoon, things were looking up. As I bravely made my way to La Rocque for a dip in the sea, the sun was punching little holes in the clouds above Fauvic as the smog finally cleared. Saturday’s return to normal August service swept away all those dull memories and the warm evening offered a rare summer 2008 treat — the opportunity to sit outside past dusk.

Don’t take this comment on the second disappointing August in a row to mean that I regard this summer as being a washout weather-wise. Looking on the bright side of Island life, with Charlie Chuckle’s Laughter Factory on its hard-earned and well-deserved summer break — and our beloved political leaders deservedly sunning themselves on foreign shores or labouring away on election manifestos, with promises of a brighter future for us all in return for placing a cross next to their names on the election ballot — we have been thankfully spared the usual blanket coverage of their daring feats.

Resting as I am between appointments, I have had the luxury of being free of the nine-to-five drudge, so every day has, to misquote Pistol in Shakespeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, been my oyster. Whether the sun has shone or not, I have had the leisure time to take every day as it came, and enjoy it I jolly well have.
The worst thing about last week’s grey days was unwelcome dark mornings. Being an early riser, the prospect of dark starts to the day fills me with dread.

But the short days and long, dark nights herald the return of a far worse malaise than a typical British summer — light pollution. As daylight hours diminish, we switch on lights — inside and out — to compensate. With a week or so left of the ‘silly season’, a news report emerged last week that caught my interest.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, usually so reticent in commenting on the various controversies raging among his flock, turned his attention to the Church of England’s carbon footprint. The venerable cleric has lent his name to an environmentally friendly guide on energy savings in churches — a sort of save our souls and save the planet edict. High on the list was cutting down on the illumination of churches — eight years after the Anglican Church embraced a multi-million pound Millennium scheme to floodlight 400 selected churches.

Rather than extravagantly floodlighting churches every night, the guide, ‘Don’t Stop at the Lights’, suggests that illumination should be reserved for celebrating special occasions such as Christmas, Easter or in memory of a loved one. I do hope that Jersey’s Anglicans will consider doing the same with the parish churches in an effort to reduce the Island’s carbon footprint.

St Helier’s many and varied sources of light pollution omit an orange glow that reaches inland to illuminate our countryside, where home security, commercial and school lighting, along with sports grounds floodlights, make Jersey, on a winter’s night, visible far into space. We all want to feel safe and secure in our own little castles, but is the crime rate high enough to justify illumination on a scale comparable to the floodlighting of Mont Orgueil? At least in Gorey the lights go off at a reasonable hour and don’t automatically come on in the early hours when a cat strolls across a garden.

We live in an age when illumination throughout the night is part and parcel of everyday life, but it doesn’t have to be intrusive or cause unnecessary pollution or nuisance. If lights have to shine, they should only do so where needed and wanted — and nowhere else.

As the Church of England guide so pertinently observes, ill-directed lighting wastes money and energy, thereby adding to air pollution and emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. And it plays havoc with nature by confusing animal and plant life as to whether it is night or day.

Above all, light pollution deprives us all of the pleasure of enjoying the night’s dark, starry skies. One of the highlights of my frequent trips to north Cornwall is to gaze upwards on clear nights at stars and constellations, in particular the Milky Way, sparkling far more brightly and distinctly than I can ever expect to see above Jersey.
I live in hope that one day I shall be able to do the same here in Jersey.