Do you remember it? Summer is the season after Spring this much I know yet I for one have forgotten just what a good sustained period of sun and warmth feels like. The Met Office has released figures placing this Spring as one of the five coldest since records began. In fact the coldest since 1962!!
What happened to those sunny days one remembers from childhood? They seemed to be endless. Long warm nights would stretch on, you wouldn’t venture indoors until you heard your mum calling you in.
I can still smell that smell so reminiscent of summer. Freshly mowed grass, honey suckle gentle hitching a ride on the warm breeze. But most of all it smelt of fun, of freedom and of happiness. An intoxicating blend.
So what can be done? Aside of course from grabbing a foreign holiday, what can we do to bring forth the summer? Can we control the weather? If indeed we could, should we?
I recall the Beijing Olympics and the attempts to halt any rain threatening to dampen spirits. Reports emerged that they spent in excess of $100 million trying to fathom how they could control the weather. The solution: shoot artillery shells into the clouds to blast whatever rain they were hosting away. The same reports stated that China had more than 3,000 people on rain-fighting duty, armed with 7,000 anti-rain cannons and some 5,000 anti-rain rocket launchers.
So perhaps not the most scientific approach. As we know weather forecasting is now big business. Meteorological data is collected from robotic buoys in the ocean, from ships, from satellite views and from thousands of volunteer climate observers. Although currently, you wouldn’t have to be that well equipped to predict the current weather front.
It’s hard to believe that we’re heading into June. Many of us have turned the heating back on and the winter woollies haven’t been packed away just yet.
We have all read and heard of the threat of Global Warming. And the environment is certainly something we take seriously here at Comms Express. Yet the title I fear is rather a misnomer.
Of course, being British moaning about the weather is a national past time. If it were an Olympic Sport we would be Usain Bolt. The opposition wouldn’t stand a chance. It’s too hot? See, here we are fighting for shade and carping about the oppressive heat. Within days a hosepipe ban is enforced and that’s when you know summer is here. Too cold? And it’s the blooming weather. And of course, we’re often cursed with the wrong kind of snow!
So in retrospect would I wish for technology to be advanced to such a degree that it could control the weather? No, our ‘Green and pleasant land’ is such because of the rain. The rain I feel gives us a national identity. We are a good-natured bunch the Brits who love a good moan about the weather both good and bad and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Not for me some dystopian future whereby we live in some controlled bubble.
We’ll cheer the summer when it arrives. George Harrison and the Beatles ‘Here Comes The Sun’ will be sung heartily. And in the meantime what did Alfred Wainwright say? “There no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.” Mmmm…
Until next time…
