Each day my eyes observe two minutes of minor theatricals which, once over, are instantly forgotten. Given my druthers (splendid Pittsburgh idiom) I’d resume my book but my wife insists. Then she too forgets what has been disclosed. I am talking about the weather forecast which follows the late TV news.It should interest me. It’s based on technology, measurements and science. I assume those frequently mentioned isobars are notional lines linking points of equal barometric pressure and they allow somebody, not me, to analyse what’s going on in The Great Invisible. When isobars are close together it’s going to blow. But why? And do I care?
The French TV weather forecasts are similarly choreographed but the announcers do it at 400 words a minute. With one other difference: they tell you what saint’s day it is.
Britain, whatever the moaners say, is a temperate country and as Robert Robinson of Stop the week fame said: tomorrow’s weather will be like today’s but slightly different. When I first got to the USA in early January I heard a forecast with two salient points: there’d been 103 in. of snow in Oswego, NY, and the temperature in International Falls, Minnesota, was minus 47 deg. Now that’s weather!
However there are circumstances when my meteorological atheism becomes faith-based and that’s at sea. The super-condensed information (with its evocative regions) takes on a liturgical tone with implications of life and death. For light relief I’ve been known to listen to it a second time, in French, just to hear peu perturbé repeated over and over.
