In response to my last posting, whinging about the usual non-appearance of the sun on what's supposed to be his big day, the summer solstice, a friend wondered why I had personified the sun as male. I remarked that I was following accepted, and near-universal, convention, as formalised in the Greco-Roman deities Helios and Apollo, or the eastern Shamesh, Mithras or Surya. But on investigation, I discover quite a few cultures personified their solar deities as female. Including, intriguingly, the Germanic solar deity, Sol, otherwise known as Sunna or Frau Sunne. Incidentally, the Norse tradition has another sun god, Freya who is also the god of rain. Bloody typical. We in the north can't just have a god responsible for sun like they do down south. I suppose because there was not enough work to go round, and he had to lend all the other stormy, rainy, thundery colleagues a hand with their workload to justify his post. Sunny spells with intermittent showers, the celestial weather forecast since time immemorial. But I digress.

I do find the idea of old Frau Sunne rather intriguing, and, in my experience, more plausible than the Classical tradition of the sun god, riding his shiny red boy-racer chariot across the heavens each day, and sending phallic rays down to fructify mother earth. It all makes sense now. The sun of the north, the sun of my sky, is most definitely female. Take today, I went to bed last night fully expecting the sun to be shining, as suggested in the weather forecast. But here we are, past 10.30 and I'm still waiting for Frau Sunne to turn up. Looking at the revised forecast I find that she, or at least her meteorological handmaidens, have changed their mind. A woman's prerogative, supposedly, on both counts. As the Monkees so eloquently put it, 'When I wanted sunshine, I got rain'. Needless to say, I'm not a believer. Not when it comes to weather forecasts, and well...

Now, please don't mistake this for a cheap misogynist rant. Take it rather as the tragic lament of a sensitive sun-worshipping romantic who is unlucky in both love and sunshine, and finds the fact that our ancestors thought Sunne was a Frau confirmation of a big theme in my book. A book I describe as 'an open love letter to the most fickle mistress northern man ever served'. I have a whole chapter on love and sunshine, and why all those pop songs and before them poems, find the weather a perfect metaphor for the highs and lows of love. I'll sign off by quoting myself from that chapter: "Weather must surely be the most baffling, tricksy, and infuriating realm of experience to have tasked the intellect, patience or reason of man, from the very dawn of time. After love, of course.". I'll leave my post now, but intend to return to this theme another day. I don't think I've exhausted it, it's just that I have to go upstairs and close the skylight through which rainy Freya, who has come in the stead of Frau Sunne, is now tinkling. TBC...