Over here in our sceptered isle we put our clocks forward last Sunday for British Summer Time and one week later it’s snowed and LAID.
I’m dreaming of a white summer.
Woke up to piles of the stuff. And its *still * snowing, although very much less than it has been.
Madness, but a pretty madness.
Up here in the East Midlands the morning was bright and sunny without a cloud in the sky (but there was a biting north wind). We did have snow on Easter Sunday morning though. I can remember back in the mid 70’s when in snowed in the first week of June. It even stopped the cricket.
Beautiful sunny morning here yesterday, went shopping in the City centre with just a t-shirt on and was comfortably warm. Safely thought, then, that we’d be fine walking to big fancy dinner without umbrellas/taxis.
Cut to twenty tipsy people wearing black tie running from pub to dinner in a blizzard, only four hours later. I like my weather to be somewhat consistent usually, guess I picked the wrong part of the country!
When you say “British summer time” you mean like our Daylight Savings Time, not that Aprils are literally summer-like in the UK, right? I live somewhere where snow until the end of the month is normal, so I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea that there could be an expectation of summery weather somewhere in the Northern hemisphere right now.
Four hours in the pub? A true Glaswegian pre-dinner drink 
My kids woke up and went downstairs to surgically attach themselves to the television, without bothering to open the curtains, so they didn’t know it was happening. My wife got up and looked out of the window, then cried out in surprise - there was a two-inch blanket of snow on everything and it was still falling, fast - she went down to tell the kids and they immediately started throwing clothes on so they could go out in it.
I wandered down and acted deliberately nonchalant…
-Kids said “Dad! Dad! it’s SNOWING!”
-I replied (careful not to look out of any windows) “Are you sure? It might just be one of those thick frosts…”
-They practically screamed at me to look (I did)
-I suggested “Hey, why don’t we just stay in and watch a TV programme about snow instead?”
But it was too late - they were out of the door (leaving it wide open).
So I got to test out the sledge I built three winters ago (works fine) - although only on the flat - kids riding on it and me playing reindeer - by the time we’d got ourselves organised and driven to a decent hill, it had already melted too much to use the sledge.
Yesterday I was outside in shorts and Tshirt.
Today it was three layers, gloves, scarf and bobble hat. It’s spring, but it does have warm moments (as well as cold, wet, windy and indeed, white ones)
Pre-dinner drinks were officially at seven, these were pre-pre-dinner drinks.
It was beautiful yesterday! We were driving back to Cheshire from Derbyshire, over the Peaks, and the sun was shining as the snow fell down, just glorious! Didn’t even mind taking a side route because the road to Buxton was closed off.
The term does cause some confusion, with people occasionally asserting that the clocks going forward marks a supposed official start of summer. But no, April is very much a spring month. Mind you, last year April was very warm and the sunniest month of the year.
April always has unpredictable weather. We are sandwiched between cold air to the north and warm air to the south with the UK forming the battle-ground between these two weather systems.
That’s okay. Here April is often considered the tail end of winter. We had spring in April last year, though. Only time in my life I’ve ever experienced a spring that followed the calendar.