Weather

It’s raining.

Not just any old rain. It’s torrential, cats and dogs, coming down in stair rods, pissing down.

Mixed with the swirling wind, it now feels like our house is in a car wash.

This reminded me of my true Britishness and compelled me to talk about the weather a bit.

Our love of talking about it is second only to our love of Gregg’s-fuelled drinking binges.

We spend so much of our time complaining about weather.

“It’s too hot.”

“It’s too cold.”

Every single one of us is like a meteorological Goldilocks, except it’s never, ever “just right”.

We lambast weather presenters for failing to get it right on an almost daily basis, but when the newspapers warn us that the coldest winter on record is approaching, we happily believe them. Winter arrives and the doom merchants are invariably wrong, so we gripe about that, as if we actually wanted to perish after popping outside in severe sub-zero temperatures, like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.

The country grinds to a halt due to a few flakes of snow and we moan about “extreme weather”. It’s not a new phenomenon. Snow comes at some point pretty much every year, but we conveniently forget. Best cancel all forms of public transport, just to be on the safe side.

Sky News send their reporters out to snowy areas to tell us about snow.

“We can confirm that the snow is white and cold,” an intrepid reporter will inform us in between interviewing people whose cars won’t start or who are battling the injustice of having to walk for fifteen minutes to get to work.

Summer is no better.

“Phew, what a scorcher!” the papers will say, accompanied by the obligatory picture of someone sitting in a deckchair on Brighton beach, lobster-red and holding an ice cream.

Now Sky News will send a reporter to a beach who will roll up the legs of their trousers and paddle in sewage-filled waters as they talk about “the hottest day on record” and “heatwaves”.

People will dream of days spent lounging around in parks full of picnic litter and drinking fancy chilled lagers from vase-like glasses in beer gardens, but before we know it, it’s over.

British summer lasts for approximately three weeks and then it’s back to being cold and grey.

Of course, one day the ice caps will melt and most of the planet will become an Atlantis-esque mass grave. Those of us who are left will be slowly fried by the sun and burned by the frequent showers of acid rain.

And then Michael Fish failing to predict a hurricane will seem pretty damn trivial.