Something is wrong with the weather

Lean in a bit – I need to whisper this. The weather has been really... quite good recently, hasn’t it? I know. Weird, right?

As someone who wanted to be a meteorologist whilst growing up, I find the weather pretty darn interesting. After our recent winter, even a met-nerd like me discovered the clouds had lost their lustre, the silver lining notably absent.

So with last weekend’s Bank Holiday looming, and having already had a lengthy run of lovely weather, I made the logical assumption; it would be cataclysmically awful. Rain, wind, maybe even snow and a miniature tornado to get the 24 hour rolling news channels all excited.

But it was, as I’m assuming you noticed, even nicer than before. Warm. Dry. Smashing. I have red marks on my arm from pinching myself to check I wasn’t dreaming. And it continued this week too.

To further enhance the distinct and unexpected pleasure this has delivered, it appears to have been cloudy, binning it down, and distinctly chilly in the south and London. Aw. Bless. That’s sincerely meant, and I wasn’t snickering. It’s.. ah... hay fever.

I had the immense pleasure of strolling around Arnside’s Open Gardens, in aid of the NSPCC. With good weather in the build up, they were tweaked to gorgeous perfection.

In one, where the lucky owner’s land extended into the edge of a wood, there was the most stunning display of wild garlic in flower I have ever seen. A blanket of white and green, highlighted by shafts of sunlight thought the trees. Breathtaking – and it smelt pretty awesome too.

Along the coast, there were families dotted around, with children playing on the sand, all floppy hats and over-sized sunglasses, building sandcastles, eating (and wearing) ice creams and flying kites.

For years now, I’ve had a nagging irritation – a dark cloud of my own. I can remember a time when I was little, when the sun shone, there were days out and fun, sandcastles and sandwiches, lollies and laughter, and it felt like it would last forever.

Life (and the realities of the British climate) slowly but surely crushed that sweetly misguided remembrance, until I, like many, reached the antithesis of it - a depressing assumption that whenever you want it to be nice, it definitely won’t be.

It will eventually ebb away, but for a few weeks, and significantly over a Bank Holiday weekend, the weather is like mini-me naively assumed it would always be. Fabulous.

And seeing everyone out enjoying it only adds to the thrill. Warm on the outside, and warm on the inside. There will be lousy weather again soon; it’s probably working itself into a frenzy over the Atlantic right now.

But the delight of what we’ve had has topped up my battery of weather-related happiness, after I had assumed the charger to be long broken.

I hope it did for you too. Use it to keep cosy through the nasty bits of both the weather, and life.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 3rd of June 2016, where it was retitled "Weather's hot topic for me".

You can see a couple of the pictures of the amazing blanket of wild garlic with this post. It truly was breathtaking - at a couple of levels.

Remarkably, despite having spotted some heavy downpours north of us on weather radar today, we've remained dry and very hot.

Annoyingly, I've got a hideous summer cold, exacerbated by hay fever, but there's a yang for every ying, right kids?

Continuing a downward trend, May's stats show this blog to have received slightly less hits than in April, making it the lowest month since September 2011, which is disappointing.

I guess I need to write better stuff, eh?

(CD A-Z: Blind Boy Fuller - "Heart Ease Blues". Twangsome.)

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...

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