Weather or Not

There appears to be one thing that the British are perceived to be totally obsessed with – and that’s the weather.

And when we’re not talking about it we’re having trouble dealing with it. Come the winter, and the first flake of snow, the country grinds to a halt, whilst after a couple of days of sunshine the country once again grinds to halt as the railway lines buckle and we’re suffering from a drought. So much for our weather forecasters. You would have thought we’d have all learnt by now.

We have supercomputers that are capable of processing billions of instructions per second, deciphering a DNA helix in a moment and keeping aircraft safely in the sky, and yet we still can’t get a computer to predict the weather. In fact, an abacus, a pine cone and a damp piece of seaweed would be a more accurate (and cheaper) alternative. After all, we managed well enough before the computer.

Instead, this immense computer power means that every fifteen minutes a weather update has to appear on one of the many news channels and programmes. A shapely blonde, or dully looking bloke with an awful looking tie, will then wander onto our screens and explain (just in case you’d forgotten) what all those sun and cloud symbols mean as we go on a 3D tour of the country.

And I suppose we do need an update every fifteen minutes. It gives the weather centre another chance of guessing the forecast as their supercomputers prediction of a butterfly in Staines triggering a hurricane in Cardiff was a little wide of the mark. Mind you, it did rain in Cardiff. But then again, that’s nothing new in Cardiff.

But what has the weather got to do with dating? Well, that God awful silence in a conversation with a member of the opposite sex can always be broken with the ever handy “Turned out nice again” or a “Isn’t it cold for this time of year?” It certainly makes a change to the "Do you come here often?" line*.

After all, the weather forecast is nothing to do with helping farmers know when to start the harvest or whether you need to take an umbrella, because it’s simply there to give hapless daters a hand in the conversations stakes. And put it this way. It’s got to be better than talking about the football.

* Not that I would ever dream of using it.