Fade to grey

Smothering, transformative and beautiful, fog's close-set shroud has inspired titans of literature, cinema and art-and forces the rest of us to look at the world a little closer

- JOHN LEWIS STEMPEL

THE Romans came, saw and disliked our climate. Their historian Tacitus recorded of Britannia that its meteorology was 'pretty foul', largely because of its 'extreme' fog. They never did get the loveliness of fog, our signature weather. The Inuit may have a sledge-worth of words for snow, but the British lexicon for fog is rich in number and sophistication. I give you 'fret' and 'roke' for English mist coming off the sea, whereas the Scots have their synonymous 'haar'. Then there is 'brume', the mist that summons melancholy, bruma being the Latin for winter. As the fog expert Laura Pashby declares in her 2004 book, Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud, the white murk of the Tyne, the Fens, Dartmoor and the Fife coast is an intangible, but national 'heritage'.

Fog. Difficult to grasp. Certainly, different to mist, which is more transparent ('On gossamer threads', October 4, 2023). Literally so: the technical difference between the two vaporous states is that in fog visibility is restricted to 1,000 metres (3,280ft); if you can see further in the condensed water-droplet murk, it is mist. Mist is ephemeral, banished by the midday sun, a waft of wind, but land, sea and estuary can be 'fog bound' for days. Mist is a 'veil'; fog is a 'blanket'. It is the impenetrability of fog that gives the weather state its mystique, its transformative power. When we are 'fog bound', the familiar is made unfamiliar. Our control over the world is lost. Everything that fog shrouds in its dense whiteness is rendered ancient and we and our ancestors are simultaneous.