The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC...

I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts.

Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall.

Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to rain tomorrow to the BBC’s viewers, who were probably hoping for sun so they could cut the grass.

What’s fascinating about The Schaf is that, at the start of every forecast, he seems to be in a state of perpetual motion. What’s he been up to? Look him up on YouTube – every time the camera cuts to him, he appears to be finishing up a bout of on-the-spot jogging, or possibly a game of ping pong.

Maybe they’ve made him hang around a lot and his leg has gone to sleep, and he’s just trying to get the circulation going. Nervous tension, perhaps? No-one likes to be the one to say the cricket at Lords will get rained off. Particularly hot floor in the studio? Underpants too tight? Some kind of medical condition unique to meteorologists that causes random movements? Maybe he’s allergic to maps?

I like to imagine that, just prior to whichever news presenter with perfectly arranged hair passes over to him, he’s throwing down some incredible dance moves, stopping only when the words “Here’s Tomasz with the weather” echo through his earpiece. The after effects of getting on down show up on the screen, in the same way that you can’t just stop running instantly – inertia, and funky moves, linger.

Whatever the cause, the effect is amusement. Which is more than can be said about the weather.

Like many of you, I was saddened to hear on Monday that David Bowie had passed away.

As I was blundering into my teenage years, music was a source of huge excitement and pleasure for me, and I can still remember being gob-smacked by the video for “Ashes To Ashes” on Top Of The Pops. As I became more knowledgeable, I realised what an incredible body of work his music was, and continued to enjoy his ever-changing musical, and personal, styles. The man may be gone, but those songs will live, and shine, on.

Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 15th of January 2016, where it was retitled as "Why is weatherman Schafernaker in perpetual motion?", which is obviously far more catchy than my suggestion. You can view the edited version used by the paper on their website here

The whole section of general unkindness to BBC local presenters' dress sense, and ITV's personnel, was edited out for some reason. Space probably, or maybe someone at the paper is close personal friends with a local TV weather presenter...

As a high percentage of the readers of this blog seem to live in America, me mentioning a couple of inches of snow yesterday may seem a bit pathetic and hardly worth mentioning, but you've got to remember that, here in the UK, we're really bad at handling frozen water. Or water in general, come to think of it. It sure was pretty, though...

(Out of order CD tonight - one of my Christmas presents: Mike Oldfield's The Best Of: 1992-2003. Worth it for BT's Pure Luminescence Remix of "Let There Be Light" alone. Never did quite work out why a telephone company were remixing Mr. Oldfield's stuff, though...)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog