Bloody Weather!
I shall draw a discreet veil over the bizarre incident involving a barbecued sausage, half a litre of melted ice-cream, a toothbrush and next door’s cat … suffice it say: Smelly. Stinky. Poohy.
Anyway … Some years ago I saw a documentary about Rjukan.
It was interesting but I thought no more about it than that.
Today I was minded of Omikron: The Nomad Soul and the public information broadcasts about the weather needing to be rescheduled for technical reasons.
Come the deregulation of geoengineering, will we see different regions … or even parts of town … increasing in desirability (and rent) as a result?
Of course we will.
And others where the weather rages as fronts clash — they’ll be horribly undesirable … no man’s wastelands of Detroit like poverty, inhabited by the impoverished.
Weather and weather control: that and water are the future of … well, everything — start buying shares in businesses investing in them before you can’t afford to live above sea level, in a place that doesn’t have hurricanes, blizzards and tornados on daily rotation.
Be all that as it may, however, really, I just came here to repeat my observation that …
Really, I did.
Kate Fox has an entertaining introduction in her book Watching The English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour which details the significance of discussing the weather in Britain and also makes mention of the inscrutable appeal of the shipping forecast, which is itself fascinatingly examined in Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast, by Charlie Connelly — both of which are well worth a read.
The British Isles are wet.
And permanently overcast
Which serves to keep the wet in the space between the ground and the clouds.
As a result, whatever the weather, you are obliged to take a coat with you ... just in case — if you don't then the inevitable downpour that occurs when you have passed the point of no return on your journey will serve as a reminder that your mother was right and you should have brought your coat; also that summer colds are no fun and pneumonia doubly so.
So, your choice is to be coatless, cold and wet ... or to wear your coat and be hot and wet from the sweat gushing unpleasantly down your back (like a Niagara Falls of body odour).
The British and Irish only know about sunshine from posters in travel agents’ shop windows and documentaries about Africa, Australia and Death Valley.
Contrary to popular myth, the ‘Eskimos’ don't have a hundred words for snow.
But there are at least fifty words for “it’s bloody wet again” in English.
Possibly even over a hundred.
And the Scots have more words for snow than the Inuit — 421 to be precise:
But … instead of the promised storms I was assured would clear the air, It has been unseasonably warm (above 14C) and sunny (at all) for longer than anyone born after 1976 can recall and people have been basking in the unprecedented sunshine for what seems like forever now (it's lasted more than a day). Basking, that is, in the way the shark of the same name does: everyone piling down to Brighton to wallow in the sea and hope to take out the odd bodyboarder/surfer/rubber-ring/dinghy/lilo with a surprise attack from below; it's too damn hot to sit in the sun for any length of time ... too humid ... even for a barbecue (I haven't smelled one all summer).
It did drizzle for one day … in that way it does it Cornwall when you’re not there for your two week summer holiday … (ooh, isn’t it lovely, we should move here) … but that nobody there would recognise as even drizzle, because … for the other fifty weeks of the year … it’s the only place in the World where you’ll see fog travel at 70+ miles per hour and you get soaked through in the first five seconds after you set foot out of the door and won’t get dry again until the next tourist season — seriously, you get sea spray on the windows a mile from the coast and have to bend at ninety degrees into the wind just to stand upright when you want to walk anywhere through the wind-borne tsunami.
But, by the time I got around around to complaining bitterly about it, it was over and done with … and, furthermore, not even worth the effort of writing about: no thunder, no lightning (sorry Jessica) … a bit of inconsequential fizz and then nothing — a ‘damp squib’ as they used to say.
Bloody weather!
