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A little piece I wrote following the weather warnings of the other week..!
Storm in a Tea Cup..
I’m not sure why, but the weather seems to get us British pretty excited, and I’m not just talking about the weathermen. Our national obsession with weather must strike foreigners as a little odd; if we’re not reading about it in the papers, we’re watching it on TV, and if we’re not hearing about it we’ll quite happily start a conversation with a complete stranger over its current state. However, ask us to initiate a chat with the same stranger about say, politics, and we’d clam up and go all red.
In particular, it’s the predictions of extreme weather that gets us all hot and bothered, or as yesterday’s events unfolded, a bit cold and damp.
‘The worst storm in years’. That was how it was billed. For 99 percent of us however, yesterday’s doomsday predictions turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. I’m not saying I wanted to see mass destruction, but perhaps a tree blocking the road to work?
True, it was wet and a bit windy, but unless you were mad enough to be clinging to a cliff in Penzance, you will have been quite safe at home or work. Perhaps it was never going to be such a monstrosity. Newspapers will print anything to sell a few copies, and we do love a good weather drama. Just look at the reactionary press to last month’s ‘earthquake’, with its huge death toll of 4 chimney pots and a Lincolnshire man’s canary.
There was no media exaggeration back in 2004 with the extreme flash flooding in Cornwall that washed away entire villages; the devastation was obvious to see, but the press on that occasion did no more than to hamper rescue efforts and compound the Boscastle residents’ misery by filming them wading through their living rooms.
Yes, the media love to talk up a good weather story, and a lot of us are duped by it again and again. My mother for instance, calls me every time there is the faintest glimpse of white on the weather map to warn me that I will be buried in a snowdrift
should I stay at work. This is despite not being cursed with so much as a
flake the last three times I was seemingly doomed to a night in the office.
Ironically, the only major weather disaster I was witness to received exactly the opposite press. I am referring to the ‘great storm of 1989’, when after Mother Nature had selected the home counties as the location for much devastation, Michael Fish assured everyone watching at home that talk of a major storm was ‘nonsense’. Quite what we all would have done had he got it right I do not know, but I cannot help thinking that my neighbour would perhaps have moved his car from under that great Oak tree.
Its time we faced up to the reality; no matter how much we rabbit on about what may or may not happen, our weather just isn’t as interesting as the rest of the world.
Tornados in Mid-West America, volcanoes erupting in the Caribbean and Cyclones ripping into the South Pacific. Now that’s sexy weather. Even Sian Lloyd might get more than mildly indifferent about one of those on our doorstep. Imagine the forecasts, with computer generated Lava flow covering half of Wales, and tornados providing us with actual flying Scotsmen.
There is of course a serious disadvantage to living in an area threatened by extreme weather or natural phenomena. Had there been a survey in Pompeii around 79AD, I’m sure the residents would have plumped for relocation to our safe little isle. Seriously though, there are parts of South East Asia that would gladly swap their tropical climate and idyllic coastline for a little stability; somewhere they could build a house without watching it time after time being reduced to rubble in ‘quake, or washed away in yet another flood, so before we berate our homeland for its damp, grey, drizzly days and distinct lack of ‘action’, we should count ourselves lucky that we live in such a meteorological dead spot.
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