The Bloody Weather Blog

Added on 05 June 2011

It's 15 degrees and a bit muggy. Been a lot of rain today in the west country. Funny that, because the Daily Express had a couple of headlines last month which said that the whole of June and July were going to be BOILING and that the temperature wouldn't drop below 20 degrees for the entire sixty-one days. The BBC weather page currently says that the temperature isn't rising above 16 for the rest of the week.

Having been raised in the west of Scotland - where in thirty years the temperature only ever rose above ten degrees and the skies cleared of dark, menacing rain clouds, for a few weeks in the summer of 1976 - I hate the sun. Damn you Sun, you bastard. Now, fuck off! That's what I think when the sun shines, so when I saw those Daily Express headlines, I bought the paper just so that I could rip it up, put it in the fire and burn it.

I find myself doing that quite often with the Daily Express. And the Daily Mail. And all the others.

So, what are we to make of the fact that the weather isn't currently allowing people to barbecue sausages on the pavement? Two things...

Weather forecasts: they make this shit up as they go along.

Newspapers: they make this shit up as they go along.

Combine them, weather forecasts on the news pages of a newspaper, and two absurdities definitely do not make a truth.

The Daily Telegraph was at it last week as well, claiming that the end of June and the beginning of July were going to turn southern Britain into the Sahara, the tarmac would be on fire, forests would burn, and those crops that didn't die in the blazing heat would be stripped bare by a plague of locusts. (It is believed the main reason they put this story on their front page was so that they could print a picture of a teenage girl eating ice cream.)

It might be true. June and July might well turn England into the fires of Hell. The very thought sends me into the pits of depression, and has me scurrying for my coffin to lie in cool darkness until autumn; but if it does turn out like that, it will be an entirely random occurence, completely unrelated to the fact that someone predicted it and that newspapers reprinted that prediction.

Like all things in the British media, however, they only keep printing weather stories - which might be true and might not - because people want to read weather stories that might be true and might not.

It's weird.

People are weird.

Here's the forecast tomorrow for the west country: temperatures will plummet to -90 degrees centigrade in a Day After Tomorrow type scenario, and virtually everyone will die, except people who light a fire and keep the doors closed.

Might happen and it might not.