lovely weather for this time of year
Oscar Wilde famously condemned it as the “last refuge of the unimaginative” but recent research, where over 2000 people were questioned, has found that, for more than half of us, conversation turns to our weather at least once every six hours. Our obsession with the weather runs so deep that almost 70% of British people check the weather forecast at least once a day. And the fascination appears to increase with age, as more than 80% of over-55s seek out a daily forecast, compared to 42% of relative youngsters. Hence the amount of time Radio 4 appear to allocate to the subject.
It shouldn’t really come as any great surprise that us tightly-wound, repressed and emotionally stunted Brits use the weather as a social prop. It’s seen as a safe non-confrontational and impersonal ice-breaker which conveys the impression that we’re all comfortable speaking with strangers, which of course we’re not. A fact, which was displayed by over a quarter of respondents who become overly defensive when our weather was ridiculed by foreign observers! You looking at my weather?
Social anthropologist Kate Fox, further explained “Britons need weather-talk to help us overcome our social inhibitions and handicaps. We certainly talk about it a lot but this is not because it is an intrinsically interesting topic. Inherently, it just isn’t.” No sh*t, Sherlock. And it doesn’t even seem to bother us that the most respected source on the subject, the Met Office, seems to get it wrong more often than right. But salvation is at hand in the form of long-range meteorologist, Piers Corbyn.
His ‘system’ appears to depend on studying the Sun, in particular the flow of particles from the sun and how they potentially interact with the upper atmosphere. Armed with only a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data, some cunning algorithms and a 1st class degree in astrophysics, Corbyn then calculates what kind of weather we’re likely to experience in the future. Uncannily, he gets it right time and time again. Back in November, he predicted we were heading for the coldest winter in living memory. He predicted a white Christmas as early as May and didn’t hold back in pointing out to the Met Office that they were miles out in their ‘BBQ summer’ forecast. His prediction is for an extended series of very cold winters, perhaps even constituting a mini ice-age.
The only black mark against the man is that Boris Johnson’s apparently a big fan though he refers to Corbyn as undeniably ‘barmy’. If only Barmy Boris were half as accurate in all of his predictions and forecasts!
