I truly believe that as a novelist, you cannot adequately describe the weather in England - the light, the dampness, the bitterness, the summer softness, and so on - without having experienced it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Maybe it's the buildings, maybe it's the weather, but you can see it affects us - that Scottish gallows humour; our tendency towards bleakness, to look at things in a negative way. Those definitely come out in my writing.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.
In Scotland, beautiful as it is, it was always raining. Even when it wasn't raining, it was about to rain, or had just rained. It's a very angry sky.
I'm attempting to broaden my novels' scope through landscape and weather, leaves falling off trees, overnight storms, timeless elements which, irrespective of human endeavour, have always been there and, as long as there is life and snow, will always be there.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
The book that meant most to me was 'The Wind in the Willows.' It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England.
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
Write about winter in the summer.