The end isn’t nigh! (Maybe.)

Lovely day in Cumbria...

To make optimal use of the word ‘understatement’ - it’s been an interesting couple of weeks weather-wise, hasn’t it?

Last week featured rain that would have seen Noah reaching for his saw and nails, whilst glancing nervously at the sky and wondering what the giraffes were up to. Where I work, on the edge of Ambleside, the river Brathay filled up rapidly enough that it was actually higher than the road. Unfortunately, this being Cumbria, it was being held back by a dry stone wall, so the river was squirting out through the gaps between the stones and filling up the road.

True, it wasn’t all bad. Someone in a ’17-plate Mercedes obviously presumed their car must be amphibious, and had attempted to drive through the deepening flood. When you pay that much for a car, I guess you just expect it to come with an automatic ‘boat’ mode. Still, I’m sure their carpets will dry out eventually. And their shoes and trousers.

My journey home (as I’m sure many of yours did too) featured lengthy hold-ups, road closures and those tense moments where you wonder if you’re going to make it through the deep bit. My current transport of delight is a compact Renault, which has it’s engine underneath the boot. I nearly passed out from holding my breath as I crept through the choppy waters of the A591.

And then on Monday Ophelia showed up in a right old mood. After angrily rampaging through Ireland, we received the tail-end of her strop, preceded by Armageddon-level weird-coloured skies and red sun.

Once again, my little car proved to be a less than ideal choice. It’s short-wheelbase and height, coupled with it being very light, saw me clenching the steering wheel as hard as I was clenching my teeth and I battled my wobbly way home along the same roads I’d thought I might drown on just days earlier.

Luckily, whilst the strong winds did their fair share of damage, we seem to have escaped relatively lightly. The odd sky colouration was apparently caused by Saharan dust, and the smoke from the terrible fires in Spain and Portugal. How very continental. If you voted for Brexit in the hope of keeping the foreigners out, it would appear no-one told the atmosphere.

The ropey weather in itself is depressing. When you consider that we’ve had flooding and a hurricane and it’s still only a quarter past Autumn, the prospect of winter doesn’t seem very appealing. Still – who knows? The way the climate has been the last decade or so, we might have a hosepipe ban by Christmas. I’ll get my shorts and Hawaiian shirt ironed ready, just in case.

So here’s your long-range weather forecast for the rest of the year:

November: Sunny intervals, with regular outbreaks of famine and patchy spells of pestilence.

December: Frosty, but with occasional heavy frog showers and plagues of locust.

January: End of days. We’ll know it’s imminent, because DFS won’t have a sale on.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 20th of October 2017. Whilst the version on their website kept my title, the print edition changed the "(Maybe.)" to "- just yet anyway".

It has been shite, hasn't it? And whilst storm Brian isn't likely to whack Cumbria particularly hard, the fact that the South East of the UK will get it worse means it'll be worth avoiding the news tonight and tomorrow - it can be devastation in Cumbria and it'll get a mention on the news, but a strong breeze in London and the South will mean wall to wall coverage.

(CD A-Z: Soul Asylum's "Let Your Dim Light Shine".)

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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