The truth is, John, that while Jags and I bitch about the weather cutting into our cycling, what we actually mean is that the 4 to 8 weeks of any year in which it is moderately uncomfortable to cycle in shirtsleeves or at most a light jacket has been extended by a week or two. We actually live in a temperate climate, classified by the anal retentives as a marine climate but usually shorthanded by me as "near-Meditteranean, not that you'll ever hear the inmates admit it". Icy roads, while not unknown in the North, in my part of the country are limited to a couple of days a year, and some years none. My pedal pals still talk of an occasion when I slid backwards on a hill on black ice for about twenty paces -- but it wasn't last year or the year before even, it was five or six years ago, an event that in Illinois or Canada would be forgotten in a day or two because it is so much more common. And it was a few days before Christmas... Recently I turned back from a dawn ride, being underdressed for a frost, and mentioned it to my wife: you can tell that our temperature doesn't normally fall to zero at all often...
"A soft day" describes a persistent drizzle, not insistent enough to soak through good tweed in a day, or even cotton in a couple of hours, and not cold enough to hurt. In cycling terms, it means that I have never, ever, taken out the plastic jacket and trousers I carry in my saddlebag because I read on this forum that a proper cyclist does. (No, I lie, I once took out the trousers to use to cut the wind on my legs while I was setting a truck-assisted personal record run of a 100kph. It wasn't raining that day.) Generally speaking, in the winter I wear breathable plastic to cut the wind and keep me warm, rather than to keep the rain off me. In the summer I wear a cotton jacket and when it turns soft (i.e. starts raining) I just ride for home, and my jacket is rarely soaked through.
So, for us Irish, especially in the far South, to talk of "weather" with posters who live in real cold, with snow and ice and all kinds of picture postcard nastiness that we prefer to keep on the postcards, or when real distanced to someone else's backyard, is just the tiniest bit hypocritical. Ireland is a very agreeable place, summer and winter both -- which perhaps accounts for it being one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in.
Sorry to hear you spring is a bit cool...
