By Betty Kirkpatrick
There is nothing quite like a bit of spring sunshine for raising the spirits. It seems instantly to chase away the gloom that has descended during the dark winter days, and most of us will have been invigorated by this year’s Easter sunshine.
For those who live near the east coast, however, it was not a case of wall-to-wall sunshine. From time to time, there were unwelcome visits from an old friend, the haar.
In Germany and the Netherlands, haar means hair and it is a not uncommon place name or surname in those parts. However, in Scotland, a haar is a kind of sea fog which creeps in from the North Sea to cover the area near the east coast when the rest of the country is basking in brilliant sunshine.
An east coast haar, pronounced like far, is a deeply depressing experience. It is not as if any warmth remains amidst the fog. Far from it. A haar is not only dark, dank and damp, but often so cold that it seems to penetrate your very bones. Those of us who live in haar country should be used to it by now, but it often catches us by surprise.
A haar can come down at any time of day. Sometimes a blanket of haar will face us as we look out of the window in the morning while listening to the cheerful tones of a weather person telling us all about the brilliant sunshine in which the whole country is bathing.
However, sometimes the haar deals out even crueller treatment. We awake to rejoice in the brilliant sunshine – then the haar descends about mid-morning, just as we have assembled the picnic things and the beach umbrella. The sunshine that we were enjoying has been callously taken away from us.
Also unpredictable is the length of time a haar will last and the distance it will cover. Sometimes it will be have lifted within a couple of hours, but it can also last a few days. It can be restricted to a short distance from the coast, so that Edinburgh’s Princes Street is aglow with sunshine while Portobello is shrouded in fog. Alternatively, it can extend about 20 or 30 miles.
There is something decidedly eerie about a haar, especially when it is at its thickest. It conjures up tales of the supernatural and causes you to hurry home to escape from its enveloping clutches. You switch on the heating, close the curtains and listen to the merry tones of the weather person waxing lyrical about the record-breaking temperatures throughout the country.
The word haar originally referred to a cold easterly wind before it took on its cold fog meaning, and it is derived from a Low German and Middle Dutch word hare, meaning a biting cold wind. The biting cold part has stayed with us.
I cannot help blaming myself for the recent haars. A day or two before the first one arrived, I had just remarked that we had not seemed to have so many of them in recent years as we once did. Of course, that is obviously because the rest of the country has rarely been basking in sunshine.
Betty Kirkpatrick is the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. She is also the author of several smaller language reference books, including The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés published by Bloomsbury, and a series of Scots titles, including Scottish Words and Phrases, Scottish Quotations, and Great Scots, published by Crombie Jardine.
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