The highs and lows of weather

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 26 AUGUST 2001

I SHALL NEVER LOOK at weather the same way again. As of now, my pleasure in isobars has flown and the delights of frontal lows have evaporated like morning mist in the rising sun. I am unmoved by partly cloudy conditions. Synoptic charts delight not me; no, nor isobars neither. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this most excellent canopy, the air, appears to me nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours, but the thought is not far from my mind. It was not ever thus.

I was never really a fan of weather, precisely. I liked it well enough, but only when it was good weather. When it was bad weather I was less enthusiastic. I wasn’t one of those fanatics who liked the weather for its own sake, who keep barometers mounted on their walls and nod and tut knowledgeably when the mercury drops a notch.

Far less was I one of those suburban meteorologists who have installed an inverted plastic cone in their gardens and at the end of each month record the rainfall figures in a special logbook they keep in the top drawer of the sideboard, beside the telephone directory. (I once met a man in Durban who could tell you the rainfall in millimetres of any month of any year, stretching back to February of 1964. I am led to believe that he would offer to do so as a party trick. I remember his wife having an extremely haunted look and a tendency to bury her head in her hands.)

So I was never one of the true weather nuts. My principal interest in the weather was what it could do for me. But the weather did offer me this special pleasure: it brought Graeme Hart into my life.

Graeme Hart was not, on the face of it, the kind of public figure you would expect to make an enormous impact on anyone’s inner sense of being. Faintly beige in colour, mournful of mien and bearing altogether too close a resemblance to a better-fed version of Mr Burns in The Simpsons, Graeme Hart was no one’s pin-up. His principal recommendation was that he was unflappable, personally inscrutable and knew how to impart the weather with the proper gravitas.

Not for him the cheery smile, the playful waggle of the eyebrows, the humorously patterned necktie. Graeme always delivered the weather as though just off screen balaclava-clad terrorists were holding an Uzi to the heads of his loved ones and snarling in Eastern European accents: “Right, read the weather, Mr Hart, and I suggest you make it good – or else.” I sometimes think Graeme Hart became a weatherman just to give me the opportunity to use the word “lugubrious” in public without fear of ridicule.

But Graeme gave me peace and continuity. He has been around forever, cool, unmoved by the ructions and fluctuations of the world outside the weather. Did Graeme blink when Kuwait was invaded or when the space shuttle exploded? Does Graeme have an opinion about Robert Mugabe or the plight of the East Timorese? No, sir. Graeme Hart was a pool of unchanging calm, an unwinking pole star in a swirling, spinning, ever-expanding universe of quarks and black holes and supernovas.

Graeme Hart was history, damn it. He is a veteran of the Mafeking wars of the late 1970s. Who else but Graeme and I will remember the astonishingly passionate battles that raged in the letters pages of the nation’s newspapers, regarding the correct spelling of Mafeking on the weather map? Should it be Mafekeng? Mafeking? Mafikeng? If Graeme Hart knew, he wasn’t telling. He was not trafficking in Mafeking. We need Graeme Hart. We need him, I tell you.

Who else in the entire world knows how to find Gordonia on a map? Including the Gordonians?

And now he is gone, and what will we do without him? We will have to content ourselves with Simon Gear, that’s what. I don’t mean to be unkind to Simon “Reverse” Gear, but he is stepping into an awfully large pair of Hush Puppies, and I don’t feel he is going about it the right way. Besides bearing a superficial resemblance to how you would imagine the young Graeme Hart to have looked (if Graeme Hart was ever young), Simon Gear has not learnt much from the master.

Besides the uncanny knack of positioning himself directly between the camera and whichever region he is currently describing on the map, the Gearster lacks Graeme’s steady constancy of delivery. His weather reports have three distinct phases.

The first is characterised by a kind of breezy optimism. He greets you with a jaunty air and a roguish twinkle in his eye. If he had a cap, it would be at a rakish angle. This time, he seems to be thinking, everything will go much better. This time, I’m the man. Then he runs into difficulties. In the second phase he resembles a car trying to drive off with the handbrake up. He starts the sentence, and you can tell the sentence wants to go, but it just can’t seem to get moving. “And, uh, uh, there’s … uh … there’s a cold front over … over … um …”

The third phase comes when he has realised that he has spent 40 per cent of his time transmitting 10 per cent of his script. Then he breaks out into a horse-racing commentator’s urgent patter. Where will the high-pressure system end? “It’s Port St Johns on the outside, Tzaneen on the rail but closing fast is Pretoria Kimberley East London Beaufort West and that’s all from me, goodnight.”

Never mind. There is a long road ahead. Weathermen are not made, or replaced, overnight. Perhaps one day I will be dandling my grandchildren on my knee and saying: “That’s Simon Gear, the weather guy. I remember the first time he wore that suit.”