Celebration of sunshine

This is my third year joining April Cools' Club where folks submit writing that's genuine and atypical. In this one I put on my amateur sociologist hat and go overboard in analyzing Wikipedia and Reddit data. For the past two years, check out Paris syndrome and the history of the Ninja Creami.

“The Gardener” by Georges Seurat (from The Met Collection)

I’ve managed to survive my first London winter! In the past two weeks, we’ve finally started to have a few of days of spring sunshine.

Metereological winter may officially only last three calendar months, but the British weather is notorious for its coldness, greyness, and wetness. The dreary climate has been in full force for almost 6 months now, from November through nearly April. The unrelenting nature of winter really depresses the spirit of all my fellow London inhabitants, bottoming out in the last two months especially. I was told at the start of winter that the key to survival was planning a trip in February to escape the oppressive dreariness.

It’s been a profound relief to see the gloomy clouds part. Seeing a sliver of expansive blue sky and golden sunshine, even if only for an hour or two, goes a long way to curing a miserable mood. I don’t suffer from true seasonal affective disorder (SAD), but even I can’t deny the physical fact of my body going into vitamin D production overdrive and pumping my brain full of serotonin when the sun comes out.

On a clear spring day you can find me and the dog at Hampstead Heath.

Other cities have miserable weather, of course. Moscow is darker and Stockholm has longer winters. Helsinki sits at a latitude where the sun barely clears the horizon in December. But there is something uniquely dramatic about the British reaction to winter.

I noticed it first when my coworkers kept asking me why I would give up the Bay Area for this, gesturing in disgust to the bleak greyness outside our office windows. The first few times, I’d make some joke back acknowledging my dreadful mistake before we got down to business. But after the fourth or fifth time, I started to wonder if there really was something deeply rooted in British culture to complain about bad weather.

The irony in all of this is that California is not the only beautiful sunny place I’ve lived. I grew up in Orlando, Florida, perhaps one of the most climactically pleasant places in the whole world. Elder retirees from all over flock to the Sunshine State for its year-round mild weather. Walt Disney picked Central Florida as the perfect site for his largest theme park because the sunny weather and cheap plentiful land combined to create, what the tourist brochures at the time promised to be, “a kingdom of sunshine and a perpetual living landscape.”

New vacation package deal to Magic Kingdom, 1971 (courtesy of Tampa Bay History Center).

I grew up in that kingdom so I get appreciating sunshine. It did not prepare me for how Londoners react to a single, sunny Tuesday.

On the first beautiful day in 2026, almost all of my coworkers worked from home. When I did not follow the clarion call of the beautiful day by still going into the office, my teammate expressed such profound pity for me on a conference call, saying “I’m sorry you have to sit in that windowless room.” One colleague took the entire day off to be with his family. No one else batted an eye and in fact affirmed that it was a sensible idea.

It’s such a common meme that social media is filled with examples of the British dropping everything to enjoy the sunshine.

@mildredsrestaurants

Nothing some sunshine and the sugababes can’t fix. For aesthetic views just like this one - visit us in Lexington street, Soho. People watching at its finest.

♬ original sound - Mildreds Restaurants

I saw it for myself too, as a neighbor followed the customary practice of enjoying the sunshine by sunbathing on a random workday at 11am.

Some people have the right priorities in life.

I assumed that the British would use their famous “stiff upper lip” mentality for the seasons too. Keep calm and carry on, so they say, even if it’s the first beautiful day in half a year. Acknowledge the sun, absorb its beneficial mood boosting effects, and return to your day as usual.

So what’s going on here?

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Kate Fox, anthropologist and author of bestseller Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior, points out that “weather talk” is a cornerstone of British socialization:

Any discussion of English conversation, like any English conversation, must begin with the weather. And in this spirit of observing traditional protocol, I shall, like every other writer on Englishness, quote Dr Johnson’s famous comment that ‘When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather’, and point out that this observation is as accurate now as it was more than two hundred years ago. […] English weather-speak is a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our social inhibitions and actually talk to each other.

When I read this, I finally understood the fixation on my move from California to the UK. Calling out my migration mistake was a way to connect through weather-talk, something my sunny American disposition didn’t parse correctly at first. Dr. Fox points out that the reality of the weather’s impact doesn’t matter, stating that “the point is to communicate, to agree, to have something in common; and shared moaning is just as effective in promoting sociable interaction and social bonding as shared optimism, shared speculation or shared stoicism.”

But while this goes a long way to explain weather obsession of the Brits, it doesn’t answer the question about the emotional overreaction to sunshine. Moaning about bad weather doesn’t automatically imply an outpouring of joy when the sun finally comes out.

Dr. Fox doesn’t specifically analyze the effect of advent of spring on the British consciousness. However, she does diagnose a particular Britishism regarding loosening social restrictions. Celebrations give us an excuse to act differently by invoking a certain kind of magical thinking:

Celebrations are by definition ‘liminal’ episodes, in which certain normal social restraints can be temporarily suspended. A drink that has been labelled ‘celebratory’ therefore has even greater magical disinhibiting powers than a drink that is just a drink. ‘Celebration’ is a magic word: merely invoking the concept of celebration transforms an ordinary round of drinks into a ‘party’, with all the relaxation of social controls that this implies. Abracadabra! Instant liminality!

This celebratory mood and its associated emotional freedom are directly connected to summer and holidays more generally:

Summer holidays are an alternative reality: if we can, we go to another country; we dress differently; we eat special, more indulgent food (‘Go on, have another ice-cream, you’re on holiday!’) – and we behave differently. The English on their summer holiday are more relaxed, more sociable, more spontaneous, less hidebound and uptight. In a national study conducted by my SIRC colleagues, ‘being more sociable’ was one of the three most common responses when people were asked what they most associated with summer, the other two being ‘pub gardens’ and ‘barbecues’, which are both essentially also about sociability. We speak of holidays as a time to ‘let our hair down’, ‘have fun’, ‘let off steam’, ‘unwind’, ‘go a bit mad’. We may even talk to strangers. The English don’t get much more liminal than that.

English holidays – summer holidays in particular – are governed by the same laws of cultural remission as carnivals and festivals. Like ‘celebration’, ‘holiday’ is a magic word. As with festivals, however, cultural remission does not mean an unbridled, anarchic free-for-all, but rather a regulated sort of rowdiness, a selective spontaneity, in which specified inhibitions are shed in a prescribed, conventional manner.

Is it possible that the first day of spring is one of these “magical” holidays? My experience would certainly indicate this is the case.

Spontaneous sunshine appreciation happens instantly and with broad uniformity. As soon as the first semi-warm day appears, it feels as though there is an unspoken agreement across all of London for everyone to abandon responsibilities and head to the green spaces. Parks which were empty for months are suddenly crowded with sunbathers and picnickers. Local coffee shop nearby literally overflow with patrons sitting down for brunch and getting takeaway coffee.

Once the warm weather fully arrives, the fields are packed with groups enjoying the sunshine.

I believe Dr. Fox would call this first day of spring another liminal zone. As she continues,

For good or ill, the liminal laws of carnival/holiday time apply to minor calendricals such as bank holidays as well – and even to ordinary weekends. […] Evenings and lunch-hours are also mini-remissions, and even coffee- and tea-breaks can be – what’s even smaller? – nanoremissions, perhaps. Little oases of time-out; tiny, almost homeopathic doses of therapeutic liminality.

And what can be more a therapeutic remission after a long dismal winter than an impromptu sunshine holiday?

Many years ago I read Chasing the Sun: How the Science of Sunlight Shapes Our Bodies and Minds by Linda Geddes. As I returned to the book to look up scientific studies on the effect of sunshine on our physical wellbeing, I took a moment to look up the author. I wasn’t that surprised to find that Linda Geddes is a London-based journalist and author. There seems to be a consistent British obsession with sunshine.

In the book, Geddes comments on the prevalence of UK winter gloominess,

As you might expect, SAD prevalence varies significantly with latitude. One US study found a prevalence of 9.4 per cent in northerly New Hampshire, 4.7 per cent and 6.3 per cent in New York and Maryland respectively, and just 4 per cent in the balmy southern state of Florida.

Many more people experience a milder form of the condition called sub-syndromal SAD or the winter blues. In the UK, one in five people claim to experience the winter blues, but only 2 per cent suffer from true SAD. However, estimating the true prevalence is difficult given the subjective nature of symptoms such as mood and lethargy.

How much of this winter depression and subsequent joyous outburst of sunshine is because of the real climate effect versus cultural mediation? Does London/UK have truly punishing winters and its primarily a biological reaction to the restored sunlight? Or is there more collective permission to suffer at the onset winter and experience profound release at its conclusion?

In 2022, the UK government explored recommending supplement Vitamin D as a precautionary health measure. According to the report, ~57% of UK adults have low vitamin D in the winter. This is now official NHS policy to advise the public to take vitamin D supplements in autumn and winter. So while most developed countries have set some form of official recommendation for healthy vitamin D levels, few governments have explicitly taken the step to recommend everyone supplement seasonally.

Enough outdoor sunshine exposure in the spring and summer means UK citizens can skip the vitamin D supplement in those seasons.

I was curious to see if this was reflected in climate numbers, so I pulled the data for sunshine duration by city and cross-referenced it with the list of the top 50 largest cities in the world. What I found was that London did indeed rank towards the top for the biggest variation in the number of summer and winter hours of sunlight:

Rank	City	Summer avg (hrs/mo)	Winter avg (hrs/mo)	Swing
1	Moscow	288	39	+249
2	Istanbul	306	76	+230
3	Tehran	334	141	+193
4	Alexandria	366	217	+149
5	Paris	214	67	+148
6	London	207	64	+143
7	Cairo	364	225	+139
8	Lima	162	37	+125
9	Chongqing	148	23	+125
10	Buenos Aires	262	149	+113
11	New York	265	155	+110
12	Los Angeles	330	222	+107
13	Riyadh	323	218	+105
14	Wuhan	206	109	+97
15	Jakarta	277	196	+82
16	Guangzhou	172	119	+53
17	Shanghai	169	121	+49
18	Tianjin	213	166	+47
19	Beijing	232	190	+42
20	Luanda	213	183	+30

Breaking it down by monthly sunshine hours, we see that Moscow, Istanbul, Tehran, and Alexandria all have more absolute sunshine in the summers. So although Moscow is darker during the wintertime, there is more consistent sun the rest of the year.

Chart threshold is set at <150 hours/month, below which days will feel persistently overcast. London and Paris track nearly identically and hug the grey threshold for 7 months.

I did not expect to find that Paris has a similar summer-winter delta as London. As far as I know, Parisians do not complain about winter the same amount as Londoners. And they certainly don’t go (uncharacteristically) ballistic at the first sign of spring. What could explain the difference in attitude towards winter and sunshine between these two cities?

I took a look at sunshine as percentage of possible daylight to standardize the results across wildly different geographic region. To compute this, I combined the sunshine hours with the average day length of the 15th of each month by latitude using a standard astronomical formula.

We see that London ranks as the #5 cloudiest mega-city globally.

Rank	City	Annual %
1	Chongqing	22%
2	Lima	28%
3	Bogotá	30%
4	Guangzhou	37%
5	London	37%
6	Kinshasa	38%
7	Paris	39%
8	São Paulo	43%
8	Moscow	43%
8	Tokyo	43%

There are some important caveats to this data. The other top five cities all have exceptionally localized meteorological phenomena that reduce sunshine rather than general weather patterns:

• Chongqing: famous fog basin
• Lima: coastal desert fog (garúa)
• Bogotá: equatorial high-altitude clouds
• Guangzhou: Pearl River delta basin humidity and location in monsoon belt
• Kinshasa: equatorial rainforest

Stratospheric fog covering the city center of Chongqing (courtesy of Global Times).

Guangzhou’s haziness is also partially attributed to post-industrial pollution. While China has made major progress in its post-2013 clean air push, it’s primarily measurably increased sunshine hours in Beijing and Shanghai. Guangzhou has shown slower improvement but there is still further gains to be had.

In December, the darkest month, 78% of London’s available daylight is overcast:

Rank	City	Dec %
1	Chongqing	6%
2	Moscow	7%
3	London	22%
4	Paris	23%
—	Istanbul	25%
—	New York	50%
—	Tokyo	61%
—	Cairo	69%
—	Riyadh	67%
—	Karachi	85%

Again in all these breakdowns, Paris appears very close or identical to London. It can’t be just the climate in the cities alone that is contributing to this cultural perception of terrible British weather.

Once we zoom out a bit further, we finally get a concrete explanation for this difference between the UK and France.

The UK has a much lower total amount of annual sunshine than other European countries. If we look at the sunniest locations in the UK, these cities barely clear the same level as Milan, which Italians consider the grey, industrial northern region of the country.

Location	Sunshine hrs/year
Shanklin, Isle of Wight (UK’s sunniest)	1,923
Bognor Regis	1,919
London	1,633
Manchester	1,416
Glasgow	1,203
—	—
Milan	1,914
Paris	1,662
Marseille	2,858
Seville	3,279

The south of France gets nearly double the amount of sunshine hours as London. So despite similar levels of darkness and sunshine in their capital cities, France at least has an internal sunny region that city dwellers can escape to. The French Riviera gives much-needed physical and psychological reprieve from the grey northern winters.

Dreams of the French Riviera can help Parisians cope with the winter blues.

The entire country of Britain has no equivalent, locked into the narrow band of 1,200-1,920 hours of annual sunshine.

Outbound travel from the UK to escape the gloominess is so prevalent there’s an entire shopping period named for it: Sunshine Saturday. This is the term for the first Saturday after New Years (January 3rd in 2026) and is the busiest period for booking travel as British citizens look to escape the winter blues. There is no equivalent post-Christmas travel booking frenzy in France.

And the British don’t just collectively plan more upcoming sunny vacation trips, they also are much more obsessed with monitoring the hour-by-hour sunshine forecast. There is a dedicated app called Sunseekr which uses realtime sun exposure to map which pubs and outdoor areas are in the sunlight. It was created a year ago by architect Mo Dawod as a side project, but it blew up so quickly that it reached #1 on the App Store in the UK lifestyle category. A similar website was just created for sunshine on cafe terraces in Paris a few weeks ago, but it has yet to take really off.

So after all this data and exploration, I’ve convinced myself that it’s actually a complex combination of geographic realities and cultural forces that create the mass celebration of sunshine. This city, living through unrelenting greyness for six months and seeing no escape to sunnier southern climes without leaving the country entirely, explodes into rapture when spring arrives. It’s a bewildering and beautiful cultural phenomenon.

As a final proof point, I pulled all the 2026 posts so far in the four major city subreddits to compare the sentiments. There were almost 4x the number of posts in r/london related to the coming of spring. Park visits, beer garden plans, and pure declarations of joy for the beautiful weather fill the posts.

2026 keyword clusters	r/london	r/paris	r/nyc	r/tokyo
Spring joy / sunny days (spring, sunny, warm, finally + soleil, printemps)	~38	~10	6	3
Flowers & blossoms (all flower keywords, sakura)	~9	0	0	~5
Outdoor social (rooftop, picnic, beer garden, terrasse, hanami)	7	1	2	0
Park / nature visits (park, jardin, outside)	~22	~3	~5	3
Total (approx. unique spring-relevant posts)	~55–60	~14	~13	~11

We still have a few more weeks of rainy forecasts (we’re squarely in the spring of deception or third winter microseason). Once the next beautiful sunny day comes, I’m excited lean in to my newly-learned Britishness and drop everything to appreciate it.

Let’s celebrate the sunshine!

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