But it’s not only the light, the shifting colours and the delicacy of the scene that komorebi celebrates, it’s also a beauty of almost unimaginable fragility. The smallest cloud across the sun, a wind any stronger than a light breeze that moves the branches about too violently, and it vanishes as if it had never been there.
And, in that sense, the word applies exactly to the beauty of the Canal du Midi, too. For all Riquet’s engineering genius, the canal has proved to be fragile. Along great stretches of the banks, the plane trees that helped to produce that shimmering light are gone, cut down to try to protect the rest from the ravages of an infectious, incurable fungus. Rough-cut stumps line the water’s edge like rotten teeth, and the harsh sun beats down without any trembling leaves to lessen its glare. All that is left is the memory of komorebi.
Dreich
(Scots)
Endlessly wet and dreary weather
Scotland has provided many valued benefits to the world, ranging from porridge to penicillin, Scotch whisky to the steam engine, tarmac to the telephone. Given that the wettest place in the whole of Europe is Scotland’s western Highlands, it is not surprising that they have also given us the most memorable and evocative word to describe persistently dull, wet, cold, dreary and unforgiving weather.
Dreich (DREECH, with the final ch pronounced as in loch) is an ancient word. Scandinavian in origin, it originally meant tedious or protracted, like a job that drags on and on, a book that doesn’t know when to end, or a long and boring sermon. The novelist and poet George Macdonald referred in the late nineteenth century to ‘The kirk, whan the minister’s dreich and dry.’[13] He was a minister himself, so he presumably knew what he was talking about. This sense of delay, or an unwillingness to get to a conclusion, led to another phrase, dreich in drawin’, which could be applied to someone who seemed to be taking an unreasonable time to make a decision – a suitor, in particular, who showed no sign of wanting to get married.
That meaning of apparent endlessness is still there in the word dreich when it is used about the weather – the thing about a dreich day, apart from the cold, the sunlessness and the miserable, soaking drizzle, is that it seems as if it’s never going to end. To call it particularly Scottish weather might be a gross libel on a country which, whatever the statistics say, has palm trees growing on the Ayrshire coast, but it remains a favourite word for Scottish poets describing the place where they live. Alexander Gray, for instance, in his poem ‘December Gloaming’,[14] writes movingly of the gloominess of the shortening days as the year draws to a close and the cold dreich winter days when night is falling at four in the afternoon. And a recent poll to establish the Scottish nation’s favourite home-grown word resulted in a runaway victory for dreich, with nearly a quarter of the total votes cast.
What makes it especially attractive is its onomatopoeic quality – its long-drawn-out vowel sound, followed by the back-of-the-throat ch, as in loch or Auchtermuchty, seems to echo a yeeuch of disgust and resignation – two words which, in regard to the weather at least, demonstrate how much the Scots and English have in common. And yet dreich was lost to standard English centuries ago. That’s odd, given that one of the distinguishing traits of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is their ability to talk so long, so passionately and so tediously about the weather. Maybe it’s because the English, unlike the more realistic Scots, tend to cling even on the dullest days to an unreasonably optimistic belief that there is a tiny patch of blue sky and it’ll brighten up yet.
It seems as if it’s never going to end.
Perhaps dreich is a word that Scots can safely use about Scotland, but the English had better not. And to tread even more dangerous territory as to whether dreich might relate to anything deeply rooted in the Scottish character is a subject for a braver book than this one. However, it’s worth remembering P. G. Wodehouse’s assertion that ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’[15]