I spotted a bit of a novelty in the Met Office forecast for today – it doesn’t have a Weather Warning attached to it.
2015 has certainly got itself off to an eventful start, weather-wise. Impressively, the five day forecast for our most north-westerly part of England has recently featured four warnings in place covering the whole lot, featuring rain, wind, ice and snow (not to be confused with 1970s funksters Earth, Wind, Fire and Unseasonably Warm For The Time Of Year.)There’s been no mention of the “Weathebomb” effect for a bit, but judging by the state of the back yard, it looks like someone might have let one off.
Apparently, this run of jolly unreasonable weather has something to do with Millibars, which is confusing – I was convinced they were the sort of drinking establishments favoured by the current leader of the Labour Party.
An intrusively unpleasant side effect of the recent high winds has seen me shivering in the shower during my morning ablutions. Whoever cunningly designed (and I use that word in it’s very loosest sense) our bathroom helpfully put the extractor vent right above the shower head.
A good idea, you might think, until you take into account the very short distance of flexible pipe between the vent and the outside world. I’ve been subjected to blasts of decidedly chilly air whilst simultaneously being watered.
The fact that I’ve occasionally been holding a bottle of shower gel means the striking similarity between me showering, and attempting to wash my hands in a train loo’s sink, is uncanny, except my shower gel smells of apples, and that pink stuff that passes for liquid soap on trains smells of plastic, desperation and ‘value’ washing-up liquid.
This has also been a particularly bad week to incorrectly fit the depth setting thingy on my beard trimmer, meaning I shaved a stubble depth stripe into it before I realised with dismay what I’d done. Having concluded that implying I was some sort of Hipster, and beards featuring random hair depth were the New Cool, probably wasn’t going to work, I reluctantly went for a short front and sides.
My wife keeps thinking there’s a strange man in the house. Which, when you think about it, is still largely true, even ignoring the absence of prolific facial hair. I suppose a change is good – there’s enough white creeping into my face fuzz that I keep thinking a small child will soon whisper to their Mum “Is that what Santa looks like after Christmas is over? He looks all... scary”.
Still, the high winds have been good for transatlantic flights from America. A pilot recently busted the speed record for the trip, shaving 90 minutes of the time by surfing the Jet Stream. I deployed a similar tactic on my weekend walk along the coast by failing to zip my coat up properly. 60 minutes out, 30 minutes back.
Before you know it, there will be a heat-wave. Hopefully.
This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 16th of January 2015, where it was slightly retitled as "Warning: Wet And Windy Weather Alert". You can view it on the paper's website here
I am genuinely fascinated by the weather, and always have been. My first vague thoughts about a career involved me on the TV presenting the weather forecast, rather than flying a spaceship or any of the other more glamorous professions my friends came up with.
Regularly found defending the Met Office and berating people for not checking the latest forecast, I'd happily have a jolly expensive home weather station system, were it not for the small matter of being unable to afford to do so. For the next best thing, I keep an eye on conditions locally courtesy of someone else's system, who also rather brilliantly has their station hooked up to Twitter, so that every half an hour, wherever I am, I can see what the weather has been up to at home.
Nerdy? Yeah, but at least I always know if I'm going to need a brolly, sunglasses, or thermal underwear.
(Cassette tape heaven again tonight: Tape number 757 contains They Might Be Giants' "John Henry" album, and a bit of "Relax! The Ultimate 80's Mix", all committed to tape in July/August '98.)
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