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Weather beaten
Clive Gammon
I am very interested in the weather, to the point of keeping a small, tckwa t ct; s ized brass-hound rotteronybedsidetble, Slid I've had to keep a specially
close eye on it for the last three Or four years because there is a lot of evidence that our climate is naming spiteful on us.
Take sou'westerly gales, for instance, which are usually warm, full of rain and, so I was taught at school, a characteristic of our Atlantic climate. The sou'westerly, in fact, is meant to be our prevailing wind and that it has been so historically is plain from those stunted, bent-over trees that you'll see like seized-up weather vanes close to storm beaches from Western Scotland to Cornwall.
What I want to know is, what has happened to our sou'westerly gales in the last feW years? Nor'westers, yes. Any amount of the cold, miserable, hail-bearing things that neither put a good flood on the salmon rivers or surf on beaches to bring in shoals of sea-bass. But sou'westers? Consider the curious experience of the film company in Count. of Kerry a few years since, there to shoot David Lean's Ryan's Daughter.
They wanted a sou'westerly gale, a modest enough wish in Kerry where there used to be two a week as far as I remember. Hotrifically, though (if you are interested in this country remaining green and free from polar bears) they waited in vain for close to a year! So it is not mere paranoia, you see, that makes me suspect that something funny is going on, and it was with more than usual interest that I switched on David Dimbleby's Talk-In last week, for it was concerned with the weather and we were promised a contribution from a weather-pundit who sounded as if he was going to confirm my worst fears. To start with, Dimbleby's gailyvaunted ignorance of the weather symbols on the forecast chart alarmed me. Clearly, only a very few of us are keeping an eye on things. Dimbleby didn't even know that a stylised snowflake meant snow. Actually, the telly forecasts aren't up to much. I don't mean they are inaccurate. In fact they have for some time now, ever since weather-spotting satellites came in, I suppose, been remarkably reliable in the short term, up to twenty-four hours, say. It's simply that there isn't enough matter in them, not enough detail, not enough time spent. They compare poorly (as do those on BBC radio, except for the long-wave shipping forecast) with those put out by the Irish, though theirs is admittedly a smaller country to keep an eye on. As a model, let me recommend RTE's 5.55 p.m. forecast for farmers and fishermen, especially its concern with wind direction and velocity, something hardly touched on in our native product which seems simplistically concerned mainly with whether the sun is going to shine or not.
Well, the pundit did come on and confirmed my fears. Drier winters. Colder summers. That's what we are in for and even though a lady in Dimbleby's audience in an amiably dotty way claimed that she could influence the weather with her thoughts,. there doesn't seem much to be done about it, since the atmos phere, we were told, is unimaginably powerful And difficult to tamper with.
Meanwhile there was an interesting contribution from a psychologist from Ulster who had figured out the effect of the climate on the people of different European nations. Anxiety indices, or something like that, he called them. It turned out that, in his view, the least anXious nation was Ireland, the twitchiest, Austria. Since his conclusions were partly based on the suicide rate and since in Catholic Ireland coroners are notoriously unwilling to bring in a suicide verdict, thereby giving the impression that it hardly ever takes place there, he was probably 'working on a pretty rocky base.
Well there it is. The glass is clearly falling hour by hour. And even breaking the bloody box, as MacNeice might have emended his poem to read, won't hold up the weather.
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