Word up

In a telly programme he did some time ago the TV critic (he writes about television, he doesn't wear dresses. Actually he might do, but I've never seen it. Anyway...) Charlie Brooker was explaining that he had seen a programme so terrible it had moved beyond the dictionary's ability to describe it, and suggested that two words be combined to try and imply the level of awfulness. With his usual scatological style he described it as 'shittifying'.

This notion, of mashing up who words with negative meaning to somehow create a word describing negativity squared, appeals greatly. This week I was asked to describe how something had gone and, to be honest: 'shitastrophic' was the only thing that fitted the bill.

This tickled colleagues so much that I have heard somebody use the term ‘shitastrophy’ to describe a recent incident, unfortunately I think it might have been in reference to something I had done.

The expansion of the lexicon is not restricted to negative things; certainly one of my favourite terms is ‘geekgasm’; used to describe a successful shopping trip to a comics or gaming shop, or a particularly excellent episode of Doctor Who. In fact you can prefix ‘gasm’ with just about anything to describe a rushing gushing feeling of joy at experiencing something rather lovely ‘bookgasm’, ‘foodgasm’, ‘decentpintgasm, although the last one might be stretching it.

I am expecting to see more mashed up words appearing in the media. The first place you will see them is in weather forecasts. This is because weather forecast presenters have that sort of psudo-science aura that allows them to use terms that sound made up, but are actually true, like ‘occluded’. Having shot their bolt and exhausting the thesaurus so early in the year trying to find frightening words to describe snow, they are going to have to invent new climate terms.

Until new terms to describe things we should be afraid of or outraged by are coined, newscasters will have to rely on using the existing vocabulary, but delivering them in increasingly emotive terms. Fox news is leading the field in this, rightly concluding that their viewers do not want to see a rational, measured explanation of what’s happening in the world delivered at a reasonable volume but instead want to watch the sort of rant that’s a combination of a toddler throwing a tantrum, an evangelical preacher and a maniac with tin foil wrapped round his head standing on the street corner screaming abuse at cats.

The Biggish Dump

Is that it? Three sodding inches? Given the media hysteria I was expecting to wake up to yetis. I think, to be fair, that my little corner of the world has gotten off lightly. Naturally, we had the usual issues – barely had a flake fallen when all the trains lost traction and all the schools closed. This meant that all the kids had to stay at home but that’s okay because the parents can’t get to work because no trains are running and the council has run out of grit.

In truth, it wasn’t the snow that was a problem, it was the freezing temperatures. The snow fell, then turned to ice. Which English people do not know how to drive on – moving over the ice with about the same level of style and confidence as a sobbing fat kid in a sequined jump suit a confidence building course, about to attempt a triple axle in front of the entire school.

The snow reveals a new landscape. Like Narnia with litter. It also reveals that after a week of snow last year, people still don’t prepare for the weather. Or, rather, the public appear to break down into two groups. There are those that go out dressed in the gear they bought for camping/walking or skiing holidays. The ones that spent a fortune on gear for a skiing holiday don’t look smug, they just look bloody grateful to finally get a chance to wear their expensive skiing jacket, because they can’t afford to go on the skiing holiday after the sterling exchange rate went down faster than a chubby girl on a black diamond run.

The rest fall into two sub-categories. There are those who take the sensible approach that layers of normal clothes are the way forward. This has two results, the first is that everyone is wearing so many layers of wool, gloves and scarves that they are only one top hat and case of rickets away from looking like the front of a Victorian Christmas card, the second is that they are well padded when the inevitable slip and slide occurs.

The second sub-group is teenagers. Presumably the shame of being seen outside enjoying themselves rather than hanging around in their bedrooms being sullen keeps them toasty, because leggings, a track suit top and ugg boots sure as hell is not going to do the trick.

Could the Government do more to prepare the population? Well, I reckon that they should hand out vouchers for pasta meals so that people can put on some winter weight and lower their centre of gravity for safety on the snow and ice (fat people are looking smug in this cold weather, it’s payback for all that sweating they do in August). Personally, I’m eating chips until the crisis passes. In addition, there needs to be a Government approved reading list; starting with ‘to build a fire’ by Jack London (does your spit crackle and freeze before it hits the ground? No, then stop whining). Also on the list – ‘Commando’ war picture library stories for boys; which regularly show plucky paratroopers making their way through the white stuff fortified with nothing more than Bovril, then laying waste to some Nazis.

The one group of people who really come out of this well are the weather broadcasters. People look at their telly screens during the weather bulletins like stone age man looking at the shaman making his way through chicken entrails, hanging on their every wise pronouncement. ‘More snow’ is a pretty safe bet at the moment. I don’t know what they use at the Met Office to forecast the weather, a supercomputer or a KFC family bucket, but for once they can do no wrong. It’s an old wise-mans’ trick; forecast doom and gloom and if only doom, or only gloom, or if neither doom or gloom arrive, nobody minds that much.

Except maybe those who were hoping for another day ‘working from home’. This allows you to do several things, including having a bottle of red with lunch and fortifying yourself with a snooze in the afternoon before knocking off early to get in some tobogganing before the light fades.

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.

Wheather or not

The exception to dumbing down of broadcasting is the weather forecast. It’s certainly become more ‘user friendly’, with little animations and so on replacing cloud symbols, but it’s all underpinned by hard science and the forecasts are supported by the sort of men who have evolved long pointy chins through stroking them while considering ‘is it going to rain tomorrow’?

Forecasting is not an exact science. From the days of sages looking at the flight of birds, through rustic types looking at seaweed and pine cones nailed to sheds right through to modern computer generated forecasts using data drawn from weather buoys, satellites and the state of the chief-forecaster’s corns, there has always been room for error. But the forecast has improved.

Which is why when you see the animations give way to actual isobars, packed close, it elicits the sort of response in a viewer only normally observed when they see a picture of their house on telly with a reporter standing outside it in a flak vest - in front of a tank and dozens of coppers with the word ‘live’ in the bottom left hand corner of the screen and themselves peering through the window and looking back and forth in disbelief at their telly.

Certainly that was the case last night, when the North Norfolk Coast was on red alert. High tides, winds, low pressure systems and a vengeful god all combined to bring the danger of flooding. My immediate concern was ‘will the fish and chipper at Wells be affected?’.

Luckily, last night passed without major watery incident.

But it did mean that, for a while there, forecasts were the centre of attention. I think they are usually exciting anyway. The shipping forecast is pure poetry. Forecasts are important, not just to those who rely on the weather to make their living, fishermen and farmers, but as an island nation to those of us who still have a genetic link to the sailors and land labourers of the past.

Which is why I think that there should be a rusticated forecast. Away with measurement of sunshine hours, the pollen index and the atmospheric pressure. I want to hear that it’s going to be ‘bosky’ tomorrow, with ‘gloaming’ spells developing toward evening. Temperature range, who needs more than: bloody hot, hot, cold, brass monkeys and ‘christ, it’s cold’?