What a thatcher reads in the sky

Gwen Trask has thatched in Somerset for thirty-one years. On the morning I met her she said Thursday would be dry until about four, and it was, and she had not looked at a forecast since roughly 1998.

It is tempting to file this as folklore, and I think that would be a mistake. What she is doing is not mysterious; it is just a kind of reading that we have stopped counting as reading.

She is not predicting the weather, she is reading one roof

A forecast is a claim about a county. Gwen needs a claim about one roof, on one hill, on Thursday, and the county-level answer is frequently useless to her at that resolution.

So she reads the things a forecast cannot: which way the reed is lying, how the light is behaving over the Levels, what the ground did overnight, and thirty-one years of the same eleven hills. It is closer to a diagnosis than a prediction, and it is built from an enormous quantity of attention paid to one small place over a long time.

(She was wrong on the Friday, by about three hours, and was considerably more annoyed about it than the situation warranted.)

Thirty-one years on eleven hills, and what looks like second sight is just somebody who has been paying attention to the same sky for longer than I have been working.