Although the sun has been teasing us a bit lately, with promises of spring, the weather just keeps turning miserable again. It is getting everybody down. But there’s nothing we can do about it, we just have to keep plodding along, doing the best we can, hoping things do not get any worse. Gordon Brown provides the perfect match for this.
It is nothing like the spring of 1997 – a real time for optimism. Then Sunny Dave might stand more of a chance, hope for better things from a change.
I can stretch this analogy further. We have lost a lot of our faith in politicians; we have stopped listening to them.
We have also become less convinced by confident assertions about the inevitability of global warming, helped in no little way by the unreliability of the Met Office’s seasonal forecasts of barbecue summers & mild winters.
At the weekend a young local tree surgeon confirmed my feeling that the daily & weekly forecasts have also become less reliable of late. I personally have given up trying to catch the last local weather forecast of the day, just after the 9pm news, & wait instead for the revised version next morning before deciding what to wear.
The young tree surgeon has the Met Office weather forecast as his home page to help him plan his work – but says that it has caused him so much waste of time recently that he is considering taking it off & just relying on his own reading of the prospects for wind & rain.
It would be interesting to see if the formal assessment of the forecasts accuracy confirms this impression; we have certainly heard a lot about the unpredictable & unusual behaviour of the jet stream. And just to add to the gloom, Paul Simons informed us that an Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, erupted for only the fourth time in 1,000 years Saturday before last & that “The effects on the UK [weather] could be severe.”
Icelandic revenge, perhaps, for having the anti-terrorism act used against them. Trouble is, if there is anything in my theory, rather than getting rid of Gordon the result will be an even more lethargic decision to stick with the government we know.
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