The Weather Forecast

Tuesday 17th March

The Weather forecast is one of those things we all watch, and yet at the same time take hardly any notice of.  Who can really remember what they said last night?  It all seems a blur, the isobars mean little, even the squares with the temperature pass us by, and those little wind arrows point away with little purpose.  But an incredible amount of work goes into them, measuring data and feeding it in to computer programmes that look at similar rises and falls in temperature or pressure or wind speed and predict what they think the movements of high and low pressure will mean in the way of sunshine or rain, which is what most of us are concerned with.

My Uncle Pow, his real name was Albert but for some reason he was known a Pow, had a barometer, which would give a pretty accurate prediction.  Pow would move the fixed needle to the moving one each day and whichever way the needle registering air pressure moved would indicate if it would be rainy or sunny.  Maybe in its’ way it was as accurate as all these complicated weather computers.

But the forecasters are clever, they nearly always leaven their predictions with conditional statements. “It should be mostly sunny, but with the possibility of the occasional shower.”  Or “We can expect rain, but with sunny spells”.  Which actually tell you nothing.  Take last night (Sunday), I distinctly remember the forecast as being very cloudy, mild with the occasional shower, winds coming mostly from the East, but moving to Southerly.  I woke in the night to the sound of heavy rain on the windows.  It was absolutely pouring this morning as I took the dogs for their walk, I got soaked.  Still raining at eight, and at nine and most of the day.  In fact the miserable look on all these Monday Morning commuters as they shook off the rain and folded their umbrellas as they dashed into Prêt for their coffee told it all.  This was some occasional shower….hahaha