Misinterpretations
I did my morning browse through the papers.
One headline that amused me was one on the BBC News site –
Deadly heatwave sweeps across southern Europe;
This amused me on a couple of points.
One is that it is blatant click-bait and indeed the landing page declares “Europe heatwave: Hot weather sweeps across southern Europe” which is a little less alarmist. I have noticed a tendency these days to announce any weather related events in the most extreme terms. We do have to be sooo scared of the weather these days!
However my main source of somewhat puerile amusement is the meaning of the headline to those of us who inhabit the Emerald Isle. You see, “deadly” has an entirely different meaning here [amongst the less advantaged yoof anyway]. A new pair of Nike runners or the latest iPhone would be greeted with cries of “Jayzus that’s fuckin’ deadly“. In other words, “deadly” means excellent or words to that effect. So in fact southern Europe has excellent weather?
It’s pissing down outside. It’s dark and grey. A typical Irish summer’s day in other words.
I could do with some deadly sunshine.
I worked in Athens in 2004, it was often 40C and hit a high of 45C one day. I said to my Greek colleagues about the heat, they replied – ‘its summer, it gets hot’ ! The weather problem that was all the news was the amount of dust blowing over from the Sahara, not the heat.
Maybe 45C is a lot hotter than the old 45C? Inflation and all that. I blame the EU.
I don’t think that Ireland was included in St Swithin’s exclamation here, that if it rained today, we’d get forty more days of rain…
Maybe you just didn’t get lucky when he poked his head out the door!
Today is Daughter’s birthday. In retrospect I should have named her Swithin.
It’s Worse Than We Thought ™, Grandad. They’ve given it a name: The Cerberus Heatwave. That’s the name of the vicious three-headed dog in Greek mythology, who guards the gates of Hell to prevent the dead leaving. Must be Really Bad.
Are they giving it a name every time the sun shines? And what exactly is this heatwave? In my book it’s the old reliable sun and a lack of clouds. Has the sun suddenly become a lot hotter in the Med?
There was a time when the weather never made the news except on very rare occasions. Now if the sun shines or there’s a drop of rain, it’s all naming the deadly phenomenon and issuing panicky alerts. We’re under a constant Yellow Alert here this weekend – it’s dangerous showers of rain or something. Now we have to be warned about rain?
Looking out the window, it does look a bit wet. The trees are blowing around a bit. WHY ISN’T THERE AN ALERT ABOUT THE DANGEROUS WIND????