8:40am Thursday 14th January 2010
By Telegraph & Argus
Has our dream of a white Christmas turned into a New Year nightmare?
I can hear tutting noises everywhere as members of the Great British public express their dissatisfaction with the weather conditions. Let’s just admit it; we love the weather. What else would we have to talk about?
“At first it was fun, but now it’s just a nuisance” – you can hear across the country.
“Don’t travel unless it is necessary,” comes the advice from news reports which now inform us that the cold snap of 2009 has turned into the “big freeze” of 2010.
It’s strange how we seem to enjoy naming various climatic conditions associated with particular years.
I am old enough to remember the heat wave of 1976 when we officially had a drought. It’s a pity we hadn’t used our engineering skills to collect all the water from the previous five summers and avoided the need for stand pipes. Each following summer, people couldn’t work out whether they were allowed to use their hosepipes to water the grass.
And who can forget the great storm of 1987? I am sure Michael Fish would like to.
Perhaps our fascination is fuelled by the fact that much of our weather is free from some of the extremes experienced by other nations. I am sure that Canadians must be laughing at our response to snow.
You can often pass from the end of summer into the beginning of winter with only the darker nights as an indication that we have changed seasons.
Similarly, the middle of July can resemble the earliest parts of spring as we all hold our breath hoping for a run of at least three days of hot sunshine.
It’s not surprising that when a particularly remarkable period of weather arrives, we choose to give it a special name.
This is the way things will probably remain unless we decide to call our normal weather patterns things like The Drizzle of 2003 or The Overcast Skies of 2008.
Come to think of it, I quite like that idea! It would give our bus-stop conversations about weather a bit more of an edge. I am particularly taken with The Bit Nippy On The Extremities of 1996, or The Why Do They Bother Doing Long-Range Weather Forecasts of, well, any year really.
When I was a child, it would have been The Looking Through The Window At The Sunday Afternoon Rain of 1968. Perhaps that would have been too long a title to become popular.
As for now, we just welcome the Big Thaw of 2010 knowing that, for the time being, we won’t have a hosepipe ban.
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