He died in 2019. The diary runs to 2030. I have checked every day since against what he wrote, and he has not been wrong once.
My grandad wrote down the weather every morning.
He started in 1968 when he came out of the merchant navy and he did it until the week he died, and it was not a hobby and he would have been baffled to hear it called one. He did it because a man he sailed with had done it and because he liked knowing things.
One line a day. The date, the temperature off the thermometer on the north wall of the shed, the wind, and about eight words.
12 March 1974. 4 degrees. NE fresh. Clear till noon then low cloud in from the sea.
That is a typical entry and there are about eighteen thousand of them.
They are in hardback notebooks, the ones with the red spine that you used to get from any stationer, and there are twenty three of them, and they are on a shelf in my spare room now in order.
He died on the twenty first of November 2019, in hospital, of something that had been coming for a while.
The last entry in the last book is the eighteenth of November. Three days before. He went in on the nineteenth and he did not come home, and there is no entry for the nineteenth or the twentieth or the twenty first, which is exactly what you would expect and which is the saddest thing in that whole shelf.
Then there is a blank line.
And then the entries start again.
22 November 2019. 7 degrees. SW light. Rain by three, heavy after dark, mild for the time of year.
It is his handwriting. I want to say that plainly and then not go on about it, because everything I could say about the handwriting has been said by somebody about somebody's handwriting and it never helps.
It is his hand. It is his pen, the blue Bic he used, and you can tell because he pressed hard and you can read it from the back of the page. It is his phrasing. He always wrote mild for the time of year and he always wrote by three rather than at three.
There are three thousand nine hundred and forty entries after his death and the last one is the thirtieth of June 2030.
I did not find it for over a year.
The books went into my mum's garage after the funeral and they sat there through everything that happened in 2020, and I brought them home in the spring of 2021 because my mum was moving and it was that or the tip.
I opened the last one on a Sunday afternoon, at the end, the way you do.
I do not remember much about the next hour.
The first thing I did once I could think was check.
The twenty second of November 2019 was a Friday. Rain by three, heavy after dark, mild for the time of year. There are records for that. The Met Office publishes station data and there is a station eleven miles from his house, and there are amateur sites with hourly logs, and I sat with the laptop and I checked.
Rain arrived mid afternoon. Heavy in the evening. It was seven degrees at nine in the morning and it was unusually mild for late November.
I checked the whole of December 2019.
I checked 2020, week by week, which took me most of a month of evenings.
Then I started checking forward, day by day, as the days happened.
I have been doing that for four years.
Every morning I read what he wrote for that date, and then in the evening I write down what actually happened, in a spreadsheet, because I am not the man he was and I do not have the patience for a notebook.
He has not been wrong.
Not once, and I need to explain what I mean by that, because eight words about the weather is not a hard target and you could hit it half the time by writing changeable.
He does not write changeable. He writes: fog in the valley till ten, then bright, cold in the shade. He writes: gale from the west overnight, tiles off. He writes, on the eighteenth of February 2022, storm all day, worst since 1990, and that was the day the storm came through and took the roof off the leisure centre and the papers said it was the worst since 1990.
He gets the temperature within a degree.
I have not told very many people.
I told my mum, in about the September of 2021, and it was a bad conversation and it is the only time I have seen her properly angry with me. She thinks somebody did it and she thinks it is cruel and she will not look at the books, and I have not raised it again in four years.
I told one friend, who believed me for about ten minutes and then went and read up on how good you can get at forecasting your own patch, and came back with a lot about local knowledge and microclimate and a man in Norfolk who could smell rain.
He is not wrong that people can do that. Grandad could do that. He used to tell you at breakfast what the afternoon would do and he was right more than he was not.
Eleven years, though.
There are two entries in there I want to tell you about.
The first is the fourteenth of August 2026, which has not happened yet at the time I am writing this and which will have happened by the time you hear it. It says: hot, still, no cloud all day, 31 in the shed. Thunder late.
The second one is different from every other entry in the book and it is why I have finally said any of this out loud.
The thirtieth of June 2030 is the last line in the last book. The rest of the page is blank and there are forty pages after it and they are blank too.
It does not say anything about the weather.
It says: that is as far as I can see from here.
I have thought about that line every day for four years and I have got exactly one thing out of it, and it is not comfort, and it is not an explanation.
It is that "from here" is a place.
Wherever he wrote those three thousand nine hundred and forty entries from, he could see forward eleven years of weather over a house in a village on the east coast of England, and then he could not see any further, and he said so, the way he would have said it, plainly, in eight words, and stopped.
I am forty three. I will be forty nine on the thirtieth of June 2030.
I have already decided what I am going to do that morning. I am going to get up early, and go out to the shed, and read the thermometer on the north wall, and write it down.
Not in my spreadsheet.
In the book, on the next line, in the blue Bic that is still in the drawer.