I blame it on the Weatherperson

Every day I sit and I watch. Every day my brain tries to fathom out something as incomprehensible as a Japanese soap opera. I recognise the words as English. They leave the television set in what must be a logical, syntactical form, but somehow arrive at my brain as a series of unfathomable things. Nouns, adverbs, they’re all there. But their only affect on me is a look of complete bewilderment and a feeling of disenfranchisement that I last felt in room E2: Year 9 Geography.

Weather forecasts – they must work, right? I mean, every day people set off for work with an umbrella or sunglasses, and I’m pretty sure they don’t just flip a coin and hope for the best. They’ve taken advice on the matter.

It’s just I don’t get them. Don’t get me wrong, I understand what the little clouds mean and everything – I’m not completely useless. I get the little lightning bolts and the arrows and everything.

I get as far as ‘Hello’ and then a red mist descends as the weather forecaster talks about the weather with so much personification it’s as if they went to school with it, meet up regularly for lunch and are going to be it’s childrens’ Godparent.

I can easily sit through 5 minutes of weather and all I can remember is that it was ‘miserable’ or ‘cheerful’. What is miserable weather? I mean, do we need to send a card? Tell it a few jokes? As for cheerful weather, I’ve not once heard a cloud whistling, or watched the sun do that little skip everyone does after receiving good news.

It gets worse. Wind ‘pushes its way in from the west’ or ‘breaks through’ which makes me want to leave the umbrella at home in favour of a baseball bat for fear it might show it’s nasty side and mug me. Sunshine rarely starts ‘smiling through’, and I’ve never got smoke in my eyes from fog ‘burning up’. Sian Lloyd can tell me as much as she wants ‘what a lovely day it’s been’, but if I drove past a dead hedgehog and lost a winning lottery ticket, I’m going to start questioning her accuracy.

Why do we do it? I guess it’s to pretend we have some kind of control of the weather. After 3 weeks of cold weather in the UK, will the country go crazy if we just say it’ll be cold, rather than ‘that chilling freeze is going to still be hanging around us tomorrow’? Like the cold wants to be our friend?

So if you see me out in the cold wearing shorts, or I’m walking out with a raincoat and umbrella in August it’s not that I’m trying to defy the weather, it’s just that after 5 minutes of watching a tv weather forecast, the only thing I understood was whether the weather was happy or sad, moody or easy-going.