HOW OUR SEASONS ARE WARPING - 'CAUSING HAVOC WITH NATURE AND DEVASTATING LIVES'

Joe Shute grew up in Central London but was a regular school holidays visitor to his grandparents who lived near the moors in North Yorkshire. After school, he went to Leeds University where his degree subject was History. After graduation, he trained as a reporter on the Halifax Evening Courier, subsequently becoming crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Post. He is now a feature writer for The Daily Telegraph and its sister Sunday title, writing profiles of people in the news as well as weekly columns on the weather and nature. He and his wife live in Sheffield. His favourite bird is the kestrel. Below is the press release issued by Bloomsbury Wildlife to publicise his new book, Forecast - A Diary of The Lost Seasons. 

We all talk about them. We all plan our lives by them. We are all obsessed with the outlook ahead. The changing seasons have shaped all of our lives, but what happens when the weather changes beyond recognition?

The author, Joe Shute, has spent years unpicking Britain's long-standing love affair with the weather. He has pored over the literature, art and music our weather systems have inspired and trawled through centuries of established folklore to discover the curious customs and rituals we have created in response to the seasons. But in recent years Shute has discovered a curious thing: the British seasons are changing far faster and far more profoundly than we realise. Daffodils in December, frogspawn in November and summers so hot wildfires rampage across the northern moors.

Shute has travelled all over Britain discovering how our seasons are warping, causing havoc with nature and affecting all our lives. He has trudged through the severe devastation caused by increasingly frequent flooding and visited the Northamptonshire village once dependent on hard frosts for its slate quarrying industry now forced to invest in industrial freezers due to our ever-warming winters. Even the very language we use to describe the weather, he has discovered, is changing in the modern age.

This book aims to bridge the void between our cultural expectation of the seasons and what they are actually doing. To follow the march of the seasons up and down the country and document how their changing patterns affect the natural world and all of our lives. And to discover what happens to centuries of folklore, identity and memory when the very thing they subsist on is changing for good.

* Forecast is published in hardback (£16.99) by Bloomsbury Wildlife.