Shortest day

For millenia we northern folk have been mighty nervous about these shortening days of winter and have invented all kinds of potions and ceremonies to ward off the fear that the days were going to get shorter…and shorter.. and God know what then. So we have mulled wine and moldy grain (which is what Tacitus described as the favored beverage of the barbarians of the north) and those big stone henges in Ireland and even Peru where the priests coax the sun back from wherever it has wandered off to, and nowadays Prozac for Seasonal Affective Disorder and doubled up holiday AA meetings for those who overdid it in Christmases past. Here in Thailand it was April, not Decmber, that was the big deal in the old days, but this hasn’t prevented the Thai from going mad with joy over Christmas and New Years as you can see from this little video clip I took last night in the Emporium. Notice at the end that it is against the law to photograph Santa Claus here in the land of smiles, leaving poor Santa looking like some kind of frightened and much overdressed hostage imprisoned here far from his native latitudes.

With the sun vacationing somewhere down in Australia some 36 to the south, solar radiation, as you can see from the readings of a solar radiometer at Bnagkok's Mahidol University is now peaking at about 750 watts per square meter.

http://nanotech.sc.mahidol.ac.th/weather/Weather_Soil_Experiment.htm

As always you correspondent finds the season an emotional challenge, taking comfort that though the days are a little shorter they aren’t a lot shorter. This morning, in fact, the sun rose over Bangkok at 6:30 am, and tonight setting at 6:00, as I make my way to the pub for what I hope will be a modest pint or two, leaving the sky over Sukhumvit washed with a smoky plum, when I take this photo thirteen minutes later.

But where are those refreshing cold snaps that are supposed to be blowing down from the north? This year you hear Thai complaining of the heat and muttering about global warming, with the wind even now backing around to the south and the temps creeping up into the low thirties, a preview of the coming hot season.