I HAVE been doing my impression of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat again. You may remember that the cat in Alice disappeared almost entirely, except for "the grin, which remained for some time after the rest of it had disappeared". For the past week or so, white you may have thought I was enduring the rigours of our Irish summer a la 1997, I was in fact, on the other side of Europe. Only Weather Eye, like that celebrated feline grin, remained behind while its author experienced the celebrated "white nights" of St Petersburg in Russia.
The white nights are nicely described in various passages of Tolstoy's War and Peace as, for example, on the occasion when: "It was past one o'clock when Pierre left his friend. The luminous midsummer night was more like evening or early morning, and it was light enough to see far down the empty streets."
This phenomenon arises because in the days around the summer solstice at these high latitudes, the sun disappears below the horizon for only a very short time during each 24-hour period, it is bright until well after midnight, and even in the darkest portion of the short night the sky has a lightish silvery sheen. It is an uncanny and somewhat disorientating experience for those unaccustomed to it.
So what other little weather tit-bits were to be found in this "Venice of the North?" St Petersburg was established as the capital of Imperial Russia by the Tsar Peter the Great in the opening years of the 18th century, his objective being "to open a window onto Europe". He is commemorated by a great statue called The Bronze Horseman in Decembrists' Square, the most remarkable feature of which is perhaps the massive plinth on which the rearing horse is mounted - a single granite stone of 1600 tonnes carved into the shape of a breaking wave.
Also remarkable is the extent to which the city's architects have adorned many of their finest structures with a weather vane. The Admiralty, for example, one of the finest buildings in St Petersburg, was built during the 18th century with a 200-foot spire, and is topped with a gilded six- foot weather vane in the shape of a sailing ship. And across the Neva stands the Peter and Paul Fortress, whose focal point is a cathedral dedicated to those saints, its spire is 400 feet high and also has a gilded weather vane, this time in the shape of a flying angel whose wings constrain it perpetually to face the wind.