WINTER REALITY CHECK ... DIARY OF A WET WET WET JANUARY

DRY January? That'll be right. Incessant rain for the whole month, everything from torrential downpours to heavy passing showers that lasted for about eight hours to that infuriating heavy drizzle which seems to seep into every part of your being.

I know it's winter but I had high hopes for the first month of the year as some kind of compensation for two of the worst soakings I've ever had – Northumberland in November and Glen Esk in December. A couple of bright, sunny hill days is all I was after.

Fat chance. The new year continued where the old one left off; grey, miserable, freezing, wet and windy – always windy – or any combination thereof. I've never known a January quite this bad for hill prospects. You can usually bank on a couple of days' reprieve but not this time – hardly a glimpse of sun or a chance of staying dry for more than a few minutes. There was heavy snowfall in certain parts of the country which gave rise to the hopes of a 'real' mountain winter (ie. not wet) but it didn't have the decency to hang around too long. The north-west enjoyed a fine spell but for someone based in the east the journey was too much of a gamble. A four-hour drive with the lottery of roads closed by floods or blocked by snowdrifts to reach a highly dubious oasis of calm is not an enticing prospect, especially when accommodation options are limited at this time of year.

It also didn't help that I had spent the latter half of December on the sidelines and was desperate to get back out. The failure to do so meant the pain was doubly felt. An element of cabin fever settled in and my diary entries for the month reflect this (Warning: should be taken with a pinch of salt as I suspect I had slipped into a pool of lassitude).

January 1 – Happy New Year! No, wait a minute: cancel the exclamation mark. This wasn't a fresh start, just a continuation of the 2025 gloom.

January 2-3 – Stayed indoors as clouds looked like they were setting an ambush.

January 4 – Short local walk between heavy showers.

January 5-11 – Wind and rain. Full waterproofs just to put the bins out.

January 12 – Managed 11km local circuit fast enough to stay ahead of the rain. Many water jumps on the way round – reckon I could now give some of these horses a run for their money in the Grand National.

January 13 – Wind and rain. Started thinking of buying flippers.

January 14 – Passport in hand for brief escape from the damp to Fife, but even there it was grey and threatening with freezing wind on East Lomond.

January 15-16 – Sitting watching rain batter the windows. Could swear I saw kayakers paddling up our street. Though now I come to think of it, could just have been the postie and next door's cat.

January 17 – Committed to big day out with the Grampian Club at Drumochter. It was wet. Not a day for the heights, so chose the mid-level route, 20km over bleak terrain from Dalnamein to Bruar. Started in rain, dry for, oh, good ten minutes or so, then wet again overhead and underfoot. Even when it wasn't raining it was.

January 19-24 – Considered building an ark but search of the garage revealed I only had four spars of wood. Not the two by two required, even with no animals to board.

January 25 – Rain-free for 20 minutes so took a chance on local circuit again, no sooner had I stepped out the door than hit by heavy drizzle. Constant threat continued all the way, probably why I made it round in record time before the real rain arrived.

January 26 – Very wet and very windy, the warm-up act for Storm Chandra.

January 27 – Chandra chunders through, 24 hours of unrelenting rain and gale-force winds.

January 28 – Woke to silence and dead calm after wild night. Patches of blue sky and mysterious yellow ball in the sky – even if this was merely a hallucination, I was heading out. Three hours over and round West Lomond. Rain started on the way back and kept going all night.

January 29-30 – Guess. January 31 – Ventured out for lunch. Picture window overlooking the Tay. Well, I assume it was there, hard to tell through the thick sheet of grey. Even the bridges seemed to have been removed.

January, sick and tired of you hanging on me. I now understand why Pilot felt so hacked off they wrote a song about it. Never mind, tomorrow is the start of a new month. I'm sure the online forecasts showing rain icons for the next two weeks can't possibly be right …