A passage of the novel Bosnian Chronicle (Travnička hronika) by Ivo Andrić accurately depicts London's weather today. Reading before bed last night, I marked the page of weather scenography with a large stone, and found it on my desk in the morning - a note to self from the Bosnian town of Travnik in the late 19th century:

"It meant rain and mud and snow; snow that turned to rain while still in the air, rain that became mud as soon as it hit the ground. At dawn, from behind the patch of clouds, a pale and listless sun would paint the east a wan rose; at the end of a gray day it would reappear again in teh west as a sickly yellow glow, just before the grayness passed into the pitch-black of night. During the day, as at nighttime, the damp breathing of the sky and the soil mingled together in a smoke-thin drizzle that seeped through the town and pervaded everything; in the silent, inexorable alembic of the damp, solid things lost their shape and color, animals changed their temper, men thought and acted moodily"

"The wind, soughing along the narrow valley twice a day, merely shifted the damp around and, by wafting sleet and a smell of wet woods as it went, brought new waves of humidity; so the pools of dampness only nudged and overlapped one another and the raw, bone-chilling mountain mist merely replaced the stale, moldering kind in the town"

- Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, pp. 109