Batten down the hatches
Our weather people are screaming for attention again.
Give them a bit of wind, rain or snow and they go into a frenzy of coloured warnings and alerts to tell us that we are suffering from New Weather again.
There was a time when we had Old Weather. This was the time when we would put on heavy coats, take out the candles and greet each other with a cheery “Bit of a breeze today, Jack?”. It was something we lived with as a normal part of life.
But now we have New Weather. Suddenly we get alarming messages warning us that there was a danger to life and limb and that we must be scared. They even started giving storms names. I’m still not sure of the reasoning here. Is it meant to make a storm more cuddly and cozy because it has a name? Is it so we can in the future tell our Grandkids stories about Storm Henry, or Storm Matilda back when we were kids?
Tomorrow it’s Storm Isha which rather appropriately sounds like a sneeze. We have all sorts of warnings from yellow through orange to red. [God help us]. And all of these warnings have different times so we would have to keep referring to the list to see what colour we’re on at a particular moment in time. To confuse things, all the colours overlap so it’s possible [apparently] to be in three colours at once. Does this mean we have three types of weather to choose from?
I’m hoping that Joanna is doing the weather tonight on the television. She’s a cheery soul and usually makes me crack a smile. She’s a hell of a lot more watchable than the other miserable sods.
She’s the only reason I watch the weather forecast.
The only storm we have had up here on the ridge was a continuous (three days) dump of snow. At one point, I had the driveway and sidewalks all cleared. Then along came the plough and left me a three-foot berm (I’m guessing about a meter in your parlance) the driveway. I didn’t have anywhere to go anyway. The pantry is stocked, got an ample supply of pipe tobacco, and whiskey. (I figure we can hold out for a couple of weeks.)
An old friend once told me that a master at his school used to call out, ‘A bit CB today’, when it was cold, or ‘A bit DB today’, when it was warmer…
After some time, my pal asked him what he really meant, and the answer was ‘Crinkle-ball’ or ‘Dangle-ball’!
Absolutely true!