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Blowing Hot and Cold

AN APOLOGETIC television weather forecaster once informed his viewers that ‘there won’t be a lot of weather tomorrow’. At least that was a welcome change from the usual biased judgements that pass for meteorological reportage, and not just on television and radio. When it comes to weather, the entire British media displays a prejudice that would be unacceptable in any other field. Here are two recent tabloid headlines: ‘Nightmare of winter begins’ and ‘Snow brings fresh misery’.

It’s always the British winter that bears the brunt of the diatribe, couched in language replete with pejorative terminology. The country is battered by wind and crippled by snow. We’re subjected to blasts of Arctic/Siberian weather and cold snaps, although it is never clear what exactly is going to snap. At least when it’s bone-chilling, you know where you stand, even if it would be news to anatomists that bones can actually sense temperature. If the cold snap lasts, we may even find ourselves in a deep freeze. Has there ever been a shallow freeze?

Sometimes, parts of the country are paralysed or, even worse, cut off. But cut off from what? Oddly, London, where most of this guff is written, never seems to be cut off. At the first sign of a gently falling snowflake, the authorities may even deliberately sever some lines of communication by closing snow gates on roads. No doubt that first snowflake is a harbinger of the ­inevitable heavy snowfall that will render road conditions nightmarish. What nightmares they must have in Canada and Scandinavia.

All winter weather is vilified in this manner as bad. Naughty, naughty weather. What gives the media the right to impose such moral judgements? Why is winter to be endured rather than enjoyed? As children, before we have it drummed into us by the incessant anti-winter propaganda, we love snow.

Summer is never demonised in such disparaging terms. We may have a bone-chilling winter, but we never have a bone-melting summer, even though it is heat, not cold, that is the more difficult condition for human beings to counter. If it’s cold you can wear more clothing, but when it’s hot there’s a limit to what you can remove.

We’re never blasted by the sun’s rays, although they are more dangerous to us than any winter weather phenomenon. Such is our misplaced admiration for solar radiation that we even deliberately seek it out to damage our skin. Tanning is nothing more than an adaptation to that damage, caused by the increased secretion of melanin into skin cells to combat an excess of ultraviolet light. Curiously, we are conditioned to find that attractive. No one wants their skin to look like leather, but what is leather if not tanned skin?

Anything other than sunshine is reported in deprecatory terms, even rain. Rain is essential to our ecology and economy, yet it gets the same bad press as all other forms of precipitation. No wonder, as Richard Burton noted in his recently published private records, it makes Brits ‘pinched and puny and mean’. Maybe I’m fortunate – I can afford clothes and, in any case, my skin happens to be waterproof.

Weather systems that bring dry weather are routinely referred to as ‘highs’ rather than anticyclones. Those that bring unsettled weather are referred to as ‘lows’ rather than cyclones. Using such emotive terms to describe the phenomena by relative air pressure rather than by direction of wind circulation is typical of media negativity. The words are even daubed all over weather charts to reinforce their emotive power. In case we still don’t get the picture, lows are further described as depressions. Who could ever find any cheer in a depression?

It’s time we reclaimed our British weather from these naysayers. In some deserts it hardly ever rains; in some rainforests it hardly ever stops. On the equator it gets dark at the same time every day; dusk as we know it does not exist. In some parts of the Andes it is almost perpetual springtime. How boring.

We are lucky to inhabit an island that has such a wonderfully varied temperate climate. Meteorologists, of all people, should realise this and reflect our good fortune in their bulletins.