Postcard from Corsica – weather

As a rule, if you are going somewhere that actually has different names for different types of climatic events, you are going to run the risk of encountering Weather. Indeed, there is a chance that you are going to encounter severe weather.

Weather is the stuff you see people on television prance around in front of as it moves over a big map of where you live. Severe weather is also to be found on television, usually blowing around a terrified reporter bellowing into a microphone while behind him, somebody is whisked away by the wind, possibly having enough time to question the wisdom of unfurling a banner reading ‘hello mum’ in the teeth of a hurricane before being embedded in a tree, probably not.

Lately, severe weather has also been found in the front rooms of many people in the form of a foot or so of caramel coloured floodwater. Floods make places uninhabitable because water is wet and also because there’s a reason it’s caramel coloured and you really don’t want that stuff on your carpets.

Societies give different names to different winds because it’s important not to confuse the wind that brings the rain with the wind that brings a cloud of locusts when you are a farmer. They also name weather because it’s important to find something to do to while away the hours during a monsoon. Most important of all, car makers need new names for new models and so need wind names, otherwise they would just do what the Germans do and give their cars numbers. This is okay up to a point, but what would you rather pull up in, a ‘number 2’ or a ‘El Nino’. Exactly.

On Corsica it had been a long, dry summer with the temperatures steady at 40 degrees. This, we all agreed, was what it was all about. Gently sizzling by the pool during the day, applying camomile lotion to one another’s sunburn at night and all punctuated by visits to the fridge and dips in the pool.

The French have a name for the wind that drives the rain off the bay and lashes it against the windows of the villa we were staying at. So do I, I call it the ‘bastard’. I don’t know if they have a special name for the rain but, if not, they can borrow my name for it; ‘fucking fucking fucking rain’.

And here’s a note for all holiday reps, if you don’t want to be thrown in a swimming pool to fight to death with the robot pool cleaner in a kind of trashy Jackie Collins meets sci-fi way, then don’t look out the window and say ‘you know, it’s been really sunny for months’.

As a tourist on the island, I felt really lucky. Most tourists don’t get to see the island in all its moods, they just get day after day of sunshine, no doubt with all the attendant hazards, such as insects and having fun outside by the pool. It was quite a thrill watching the curtain of rain sweep in across the bay, heading inexorably closer and don’t get me wrong, I appreciate being inside a villa and watching the rain fall outside, it would be a lot worse to be out on the hillside, with your rifle damply misfiring and the wild boar you were hunting closing in on you with tusks quivering and bristles backcombed. It must be like being gored by a bog brush.

Corsica attracts cyclists, walkers and motorcyclists almost as much as it attracts wasps (of which it attracts a LOT), God alone knows what they do when the rain comes (the tourists, not the wasps, the wasps come inside). Walkers are used to being damp I suppose, but anyone on the road must be wondering, among all the twists, turns, hairpins, goats, cows, pissed Corsicans and hunters who are bad shots, just what else could happen to make travelling by Corsican highway interesting. The answer is weather, lost of it, delivered horizontally or vertically or both horizontally and vertically at the same time. It snows in the winter – the locals probably taboggan. Pissed.