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I have a confession to make. I don’t really believe in
weather forecasts and I don’t like them very much.
In part this is because of eight exasperating and dread
words that enjoyed great favour with television
weather presenters for a few years:
“as you can see
from the satellite picture”.
I couldn’t ever see
anything from those dull black and white space photos
and I resented the reports (along with tetra-pack milk
cartons) for making me feel daft. They don’t harp on
about satellite photographs anymore; perhaps the
satellite camera is broken for they have disappeared
along with TV Detector Vans. I am happier with Carol
and the low-tech two dimensional map with simple
light and shade effects and I think the revolving
crystal ball at the end of the BBC weather report is an
honest nod to the fact that weather forecasting is still
ever so slightly end-of-the-pier. After all, as they say,
if there’s a 50-50 chance that a forecast will go wrong,
9 times out of 10 it will.
I think my weather forecast phobia really began in
small childhood. My mother, the busy working type,
was seldom still. She moved through each day in a
sequence of purposeful and powerful darting: at
armfuls of laundry, at pots and pans, at the plump
arms of small children needing the corner of hankies
to be scrubbed across grubby faces. But when the
weather came on the grey-green screen my mother
would freeze like a lady of Pompeii caught by the
ash, one hand raised, finger pointing to the heavens,
stock still, lips pursed at the end of a commanding
shush. And we kids (and father) would freeze too
until the all clear siren sounded – well the arm
dropped and mum started darting again. I found it
quite baffling for the weather report didn’t ever seem
to change anything in our lives, not even our clothes
to any great extent. It just seemed to interrupt us
everyday in a sinister way, like the sound of jack
boots from a secret hiding place. The tyranny of the
weather forecast was just one of the mysteries of
childhood along with why my mother kept the only
clock in the house, the little one on the cooker, 20
minutes fast so that any matter related to time
involved a little dance through “if that says five past
it’s really only quarter to
”.
Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century dictionary
man, once said “
when two Englishmen meet their first
talk is of the weather”
Are we British folk really so
obsessed with the weather? Certainly a quarter of us
deem the topic of weather to be of such interest that
we use it as an icebreaker. It’s an interest that runs so
The First Weather Men - How The British Led The Way