Bleak is the outlook

The Falklands island group live under grey sunless skies on average, 280 days a year. In '06 I revisited the Toon, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in June. The days were overcast, my memory of the years I lived there had erased that factor. Greyness in June. Not much likelihood of sunshine for the rest of the Summer either. When areas of the country are referred to as 'depressed' a different view occurs to me than the intended point. Not poverty or unemployment, shipyards and steelmills closing. Grey bleak days, one after the other, ad infinitum.It's January in North California. Chilly and dreary. Cold sunshine has taken a holiday and the general demeanour of humans and animals shifted inward. The mountain ridges are curtained behind fog and haze. Like a scene from Eastern European art, countenances mirror the gloom of short daylight and paucity of Sunshine. Confidence and optimism that, soon, we'll be complaining about heat, has still to autoswitch into our days. Even so the likelihood of solar return and intrusion is not just a matter of faith but, for us, inevitability. We'll be clothed less and have blue sky. I wondered on that visit to Newcastle what adaptation would be needed to live there after California. Beyond my ken to envision.