Salt In Our Wounds As I drove along, a solitary,
unidentified and obviously eccentric small insect flattened itself on my windscreen. In an ordinary summer one's windscreen is speckled or even blurred with entomological specimens after a journey through the dusk, and I started wondering what, in 1954, had .happened to all the insects that I hadn't run into, and more particularly, to what extent an insect-famine had contributed to the heavy mortality among such partridge-chicks as had been hatched out despite the wet by their devoted parents. At that moment the wireless in the car began to diffuse the Meteorological Officer's apologia for the past three months—` a random variation . . . " the grumbler should be reminded . . . find solace in the thought that it is probably better to have this type of weather now... ' I realise that the practice of executing the bearer of bad tidings as soon as he has delivered them, though long discon- tinued, is bound to have built up a sort of subconscious defence-mechanism in those who have to bear bad tidings today; but I think that in this case the Meteorological Office were ill-advised, and went too far. The individual Briton takes pride in, or anyhow deserves credit for, his readiness to staunch wounds in his fortune with such formulae as Mustn't grumble or ' Might be worse.' But he does not care to receive directives or diagnoses of this nature from above. He has listened, for months, once or more a day, to BBC announcers, on behalf of the Meteorological Office, ushering in depressions, gale-force winds and belts of more continuous rain. He has put up with the bad weather; but fbr the Meteorological Office to tell him, in the middle of a wet Bank Holiday weekend, that there has been really nothing to put up with is a straw that
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