"Talk of your cold!" exclaims Robert Service in The Cremation of Sam McGee. "Through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail." And so it has been, not in Alaska, but here in Ireland, over the holiday weekend.
There are those who say El Nino is to blame. This troublesome infant, after all, now seems to have been the cause of every other weather disaster for almost as long as anyone can remember. But while the malign influence of El Nino is well documented in the lower latitudes, and even in the southern states of the US, any evidence that its tentacles may have a palpable effect on European weather is very tenuous indeed. In any event, we do not have to look for such exotic explanations; our ancestors were well aware that a nasty cold snap can take us unawares in May or April.
Here in Ireland the event was related to the annual reappearance of the cuckoo, the cold spell being called scairbhin na gcuach. In Scotland they call it the Peewit's Pinch, the peewit being a kind of plover which often feels the pinch of a few bitterly cold days as it builds its nest upon the moors. And the Blackthorn Winter is also well known, a cold harsh snap that is said to occur just after the blackthorn bushes have come into bloom.
At a slightly more scientific level, a Scottish meteorologist called Alexander Buchan studied the climate of these islands in the middle of the last century and noted that at certain regular times of the year the weather was consistently either warmer or colder than the calendar would suggest it ought to be.
Although now largely discounted, "Buchan Spells" were widely accepted for many years as an established feature of our climate and, as it happens, one of Buchan's cold spells was the period from the April 11th to 14th. Buchan's theory had far-reaching implications. In the early 1920s a Bill was introduced into the British parliament to regularise the Easter holiday, designating Easter Sunday as the second Sunday in April; placing it, in effect, somewhere between April 9th and 15th.
The proposed change was broadly welcomed at first, but then someone noticed that the fixed Easter would coincide closely with Buchan's April cold spell. As luck would have it, the cold spells came along precisely on schedule and with more than usual vehemence in the few years during which this famous controversy raged; in the end the bitter pill of cold Easters in perpetuity was too much for the British public to swallow, and the proposal was abandoned.