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".)

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