Hello again,More snow eh! I bet you've had enough of it now, even the kids are bored with it. We all love the initial snowy scene on the first morning but that soon turns to frustration when we are stumbling about on ungritted pavements, sliding sideways downhill in our cars and having to arrange childcare because schools are shut. Then the snow turns to ice and it all gets dirty and unpleasant.
My irritation is none of that, (rant time) I am fed up with the BBC news and weather departments for two reasons.
Firstly, the news department appear to enjoy the suffering of others; reporting pointless, self-evident nonsense from wherever. They hurridly dispatch an outside broadcast unit to anything, including the reporting of the weather. We are not to be trusted to imagine what four inches of snow on Dartmoor might look like, we have to put up with someone showing us. On Saturday evening they had some dreadful shouty woman reporter on the TV, standing on a bridge over the A3 in Surrey yelling "It's minus 2 degrees and it's been snowing solidly for 2 hours" To translate "It's a UK winter, unsurprisingly at night it is just below freezing and their are a few flakes of snow in the air".
These outside broadcast units are everywhere, turning up in 4x4s, like middle class vultures at a Waitrose kill. What a waste of the license fee. Why, when there is some horrible train or plane crash do they insist on camping out for weeks on end and making every report from the site? What do they think that adds? It's all too goulish and voyeuristic for my liking. Someone at the BBC needs to consider the costs of such activities in relation to the benefits that may (not) be derived by the viewer. Minimise outside broadcasts and use the money for something creative.
Secondly, the weather forecasters (especially the BBC) have just got in the habit of overplaying the weather. Whether (excuse pun) it is to make their industry seem more important or interesting I don't know, but we are constantly deluged with "SEVERE WEATHER WARNINGS" like "Severe weather warning - Blizzards [light dusting of snow] expected in York", "Severe weather warning - Floods [drizzle] expected in Shropshire" and then when the sun comes out we are told to stay inside because we'll burn. They tell us not to make journeys in the snow because we might get stuck, not to drive in the rain for fear of being washed away and to stay indoors in the summer for fear of heat stroke.
The problem is, that although this might make the lives of weathermen and women more exciting than it probably should be, it provides a false perspective on the real events - too much like crying wolf. I suspect that following the 1987? hurricane (when Michael Fish famously got caught out) it may have become a meteorological rule to over egg everything just in case it happens. The problem is though, that it creates a nuerotic society, one which looks for reasons not to do things rather than finding a way to get them done. We didn't used to let the weather get in the way of things; football matches were played in the snow with an orange ball, people didn't used to stay away from work if there was a couple of inches of snow on the ground and schools didn't shut for days on end.
Let's get back to reality; the weather in the UK is nothing to get excited about. For most of the year the UK is cloudy, quite rainy, occasionally sunny, sometimes hot, rarely snowy, often a bit breezy, sometimes gusty and from time to time slippery. Have you got that at the Met office.
Lastly, if you need to know more about meteorology (the science of exageration) then build your own weather station by hanging a small length of string outside your window. Then, each morning study it and compare it with my scientific findings below:
- String moving around - Windy day
- String dry - Nice day
- String wet - It's raining
- String cold - It's winter
Easy eh! Well that's enough of my rantings.
Until next time...
