“You know we are going to the Bristol Harbour Festival on Sunday afternoon?” I said, poring over a dismal weather forecast. “We’d better go tonight instead. It’s going to piss down”. So, we went on Friday evening, had a lovely walk round our fine city’s glorious and historic harbour side and what happened today, Sunday? It’s gloriously sunny. And the explanation? The weather forecast changed.
I’ll say the weather forecast changed. From an extremely damp and dismal trudge round town, clutching brolly and storm wear, to a gloriously sunny afternoon. How could they get things so wrong? I am not a weather expert but it seems to me that the weather forecast is more of a weather guess. Those clever meteorologists get a few general signs – low pressure moving in, high pressure moving out, rain on the way from the south west – and on the basis of the general science, they take a punt. “And tomorrow’s weather with mainly be dry and sunny, but with the chance of continuous rain, obviously. Make sure you take the sun cream and an umbrella because we don’t have a clue. Now back to the studio.”
This sort of thing is why I cannot take the Daily Express seriously. They take a lot of their weather information from someone called Piers Corbyn. You may recognise the name, Corbyn, and yes he is the brother of Jeremy who is campaigning to enable the Labour Party to make itself even more unelectable by choosing him as its new leader. But by comparison, Jeremy appears to be the normal one. Piers, you see, is behind the howling mad WeatherAction website which promises to forecast the weather accurate not just for the new few day but for the next few years. Piers is a climate change denier too, which makes him almost unique in the field of science where it is believed to be pretty well a fact. So, the Daily Express uses Piers as a long range forecaster. You know the sort of thing: “Arctic blast to last a month” just before the mildest month on record. One must assume that thousands of people believe this rubbish, but then I believed the Met Office forecast for today, too, so perhaps I am equally gullible.
It is not just that the forecast for today was wrong, it is that we are getting the exact opposite weather I was expecting. I am not bitter, obviously, because it has given me the welcome opportunity to clean the bathroom and cut the grass but an afternoon of mid-summer pub crawling in the most idyllic setting imaginable, at least in Bristol, anyway!
