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.)

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 ...

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 r...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog