Earlier in the week here in middle England, we had a thirty-six hour period of changeable weather that lurched between an agreeably warm 22ºC and violent thunderstorms, whereupon it hammered down with rain between glimpses of late summer sunshine.
If truth be told, it was as if God had intervened and decided that we Brits needed to have something different to talk about other than Liz Truss, fuel bills and a pint of beer costing ten quid at the local pub. Anyway, without putting too fine a point on it, all manner of disasters are about to crash around us all if you should listen too keenly to the reliably hysterical news as reported in British news outlets of every description.
Last month we had acres of newsprint dedicated to broiling temperatures and pictures of browned-off grassland - two weeks later we have images of water pouring down underground stations and plucky workers in sou'westers cheerily giving the thumbs-up to local television news crews. So far, so normal! Nevertheless, this British obsession with the weather in all its various guises is not just UK based now is it?
No, it isn’t - because anyone monitoring social media posts from British mates in Mallorca will recognise those Anglo Saxon traits towards the weather in the Western Mediterranean. Come on, I know that it has been a particularly hot year this year - but ‘sweating your cobs off’ in August is a bit like complaining about the snow and ice in the Arctic circle in January, or am I being much too simplistic? The truth of the matter is that this obsession with the weather i.e. any weather, is a very British thing. I sat and had a coffee with a group of blokes after a gentle couple of sets of tennis and for approximately 27 minutes no other subject was even mentioned, certainly not discussed, in the sort of funereal tones usually saved for the passing of somebody you didn’t like anyway.
All this remember, with me and my 21 years living in Mallorca seen as the recognised expert in the field of warm weather and its ramifications. However, there are more knock-on effects about the obsession with the weather than meets the eye. Without being rude, according to an article I read recently in a magazine, obsession regarding the weather is often age related, just as waking up of a morning and discussing in detail what sandwich ‘filler’ you would like at lunchtime and should we have fish or those rather nice lamb burgers we had last Thursday week for dinner tonight?
So as to link these two things together, after exhausting the subject of what we’d like to eat today, she then goes online and gives me an hour-by-hour breakdown as to the weather we should be expecting today - all this during the time we would have been at work for the past hour in times gone past. So then, in the clear knowledge of all this, will the more mature of us decide to drop that familiar, plaintive phrase - “Turned out nice again, hasn’t it?” You’ve got to be joking!