Here in Switzerland, it’s a well-known fact that British people like talking about the weather – and let’s face it; the weather gives us something different to say several times a day. But this year, it’s conversation topic number one here in middle Europe too.

Swiss winters are snowy, crisp and cold and full of goodies like mulled wine and après ski – aren’t they? Well, the last one wasn’t – apart from the mulled wine bit. It was the mildest winter ever; ‘down’ here at 430m over sea level we had the merest sprinkling of snow exactly twice, and the temperature rarely ventured below zero. It was the first winter for decades I didn’t have to shift snow off something – which was quite nice, of course.

March arrived and with it a couple of days that felt almost like summer, to the joy of my visitors from England. We had meals on the balcony overlooking the woods, and wandered jacketless round lakeside towns.

Then came April, and May, and cold, cold weather. We dug the woolly socks out again and regretted having changed the winter tyres for summer ones. Now it’s June, and the rain continues, livened up by some lovely thunderstorms.  Unsurprisingly, our lake is fuller than usual. ‘They’ say we won’t get proper summer heat until August. I hope they’re wrong. Meanwhile, there’s flooding all over the place and warm sunshine in Scotland, where I was last week. Global warming? Or just a weird year?

Book news:
– I’m really happy that Chosen Child has spent the past couple of weeks (often with three top ten subcategory rankings) in the Amazon US top 1000, as well as in the UK list.

– Later this month, book five will be back from the proofreader and I’ll be announcing both the title (which caused my amazing editor and I a lot of head-scratching) and the cover image. It’s spooky…

Merken