She’s in fashion
According to the calendar it’s July. According to my home weather station it’s the Book of Genesis, day three of the Flood.
Home weather stations are the cutting edge of cottage industry forecasting. All over the country, men of a certain temperament make their daily observance at the little cupboard attached to the side of a shed. Surely, this must be the one time when men can have their interest piqued by something outside a shed rather than within!
The Government has, in taking giant strides to become the sort of regime that renames the days of the week after the family members and pets of the Premier or only allows six state-sanctioned hairstyles, banned mercury barometers. This, they think, will make the world a more ecologically friendly place. Quite how they can dictate for that at the same time as giving the go-ahead for the building of new nuclear power stations is quite easy to fathom – nuclear power stations are built in places where people are poor and ugly and so one would never know if there was contamination.
Deprived of scientific instruments that have been around since the enlightenment, I’m more than happy to fall back on methods that have been around since the dark ages.
My home weather station consists of a bit of seaweed, a pine cone and a tattered notebook with a battered stub of pencil attached to it by a hairy string. The pencil is useful for recording information and, when let free to be blown horizontal, twisting and twitching on the end of its bit of hairy string, gauging wind speed and direction. To this arsenal of monitoring equipment I’m gradually adding the ache in my shoulder, but I can’t be sure if that’s dependent upon the weather or doing boxing on the Wii when pissed again.
There are two things that give a surge of pleasure to the amateur weather forecaster. The first is filling in another day’s readings. Once you have recorded rainfall, hours of sunlight, wetness of seaweed and what shape your cone is in, you can go to bed with the sense of a job well done. The second is writing letters that will never be published to national newspapers when you got a forecast right and the Met Office got it wrong.
As an adjunct to this, you can have hours of pleasure talking to people in pubs about the conspiracy between the Met Office and the Government that means your letters never get published. A word of caution, don’t follow this up with a declaration that the Met Office is actually a front for a secret Government project to control the weather, because people may think that this would be quite a good thing, or may even consider that things would be better if the Virgin Group ran the weather too.
Being a bloke, fashion passes me by, occasionally looping around me but never coexisting at the same time and place that I am in. I wear the uniform of my generation, tee shirt and jeans. Actually, that’s the uniform of the generation of the 1950s, invented by James Dean. Pity he didn’t accessorise with a seat-belt. I am dabbling a bit with fashion at the moment, challenging myself to root in the back of the cupboard (past the fur coats but before the snow) and picking out something I bought but have not worn in ages. The trouble is that being a bloke I consider it worth keeping a garment as long as it a) still has most of its buttons and at least bears a resemblance to the colour it was when I bought it and b) fits. Trousers appear to be shrunk by wardrobe elves. But only the waist.
My latest must-have accessory, my umbrella, is proving its worth already. Not because it keeps the rain off me but because it keeps the rain off everyone – it has talismatic properties. – simply carrying it means that it stays dry, or at least never rains enough to put it up. That’s why it should never be stored in proximity to my weather station – confuses the delicate instruments.
Home weather stations are the cutting edge of cottage industry forecasting. All over the country, men of a certain temperament make their daily observance at the little cupboard attached to the side of a shed. Surely, this must be the one time when men can have their interest piqued by something outside a shed rather than within!
The Government has, in taking giant strides to become the sort of regime that renames the days of the week after the family members and pets of the Premier or only allows six state-sanctioned hairstyles, banned mercury barometers. This, they think, will make the world a more ecologically friendly place. Quite how they can dictate for that at the same time as giving the go-ahead for the building of new nuclear power stations is quite easy to fathom – nuclear power stations are built in places where people are poor and ugly and so one would never know if there was contamination.
Deprived of scientific instruments that have been around since the enlightenment, I’m more than happy to fall back on methods that have been around since the dark ages.
My home weather station consists of a bit of seaweed, a pine cone and a tattered notebook with a battered stub of pencil attached to it by a hairy string. The pencil is useful for recording information and, when let free to be blown horizontal, twisting and twitching on the end of its bit of hairy string, gauging wind speed and direction. To this arsenal of monitoring equipment I’m gradually adding the ache in my shoulder, but I can’t be sure if that’s dependent upon the weather or doing boxing on the Wii when pissed again.
There are two things that give a surge of pleasure to the amateur weather forecaster. The first is filling in another day’s readings. Once you have recorded rainfall, hours of sunlight, wetness of seaweed and what shape your cone is in, you can go to bed with the sense of a job well done. The second is writing letters that will never be published to national newspapers when you got a forecast right and the Met Office got it wrong.
As an adjunct to this, you can have hours of pleasure talking to people in pubs about the conspiracy between the Met Office and the Government that means your letters never get published. A word of caution, don’t follow this up with a declaration that the Met Office is actually a front for a secret Government project to control the weather, because people may think that this would be quite a good thing, or may even consider that things would be better if the Virgin Group ran the weather too.
Being a bloke, fashion passes me by, occasionally looping around me but never coexisting at the same time and place that I am in. I wear the uniform of my generation, tee shirt and jeans. Actually, that’s the uniform of the generation of the 1950s, invented by James Dean. Pity he didn’t accessorise with a seat-belt. I am dabbling a bit with fashion at the moment, challenging myself to root in the back of the cupboard (past the fur coats but before the snow) and picking out something I bought but have not worn in ages. The trouble is that being a bloke I consider it worth keeping a garment as long as it a) still has most of its buttons and at least bears a resemblance to the colour it was when I bought it and b) fits. Trousers appear to be shrunk by wardrobe elves. But only the waist.
My latest must-have accessory, my umbrella, is proving its worth already. Not because it keeps the rain off me but because it keeps the rain off everyone – it has talismatic properties. – simply carrying it means that it stays dry, or at least never rains enough to put it up. That’s why it should never be stored in proximity to my weather station – confuses the delicate instruments.
Labels: Fashion, Weather, Weather forecast
1 Comments:
This was awesome.
Post a Comment
<< Home