127. 19.05.2012 Who
turned off the Gulf stream?
The doom and gloom continues. It’s getting ridiculous now. Grey, dark, cold and miserable. Is there no
end to it? April has been and gone, as has the lion’s share of May and it’s still
no warmer than February on a mild day. In four weeks time the nights will be
drawing in again and common people will be putting up their Christmas trees.
Midday today and it was 11 centigrade. For those of you of a
certain age, 11 centigrade is the temperature that causes your arthritis and
rheumatism to flare up, your joints to ache and the dry skin on the back of
your hands to flake and crack. It’s also
the temperature of your gin and tonic.
Today on the edge of the beach it was so cold and dark that
the daisies didn’t even bother opening. They just crouched and huddled between the
pebbles. It was so cold that the dog
turds were like lumps of treacle toffee. How do I know this? Because I knelt in
one whilst taking this bloody picture.
There was snow last week, but not as much as there was on 17th
May 1935 when the people of Yorkshire celebrating King George’s silver jubilee
woke up to 2 ft of snow. God help us all if the weather does that on a Silver
jubilee, what’s it going to do on a Diamond Jubliee?
According to the statistics the mean average coldest daily temperatue on may 19th
is 6.93 degrees, the mean average
warmest daily temperature is 15.73 – that’s the average temperature over the 24
hours on this day since records began. Whenever that might be.
Just out of interest the warmest temperature ever recorded
on this day was in 1948 at Glenbranter in Scotland with a pavement cracking
28.3 degrees and the coldest recorded temperature was just a few miles up the
road at Stornvar in 1903 when it was a nipple stiffening -8.7.
And how do I know this? Well I’ve got a book called the
Wrong kind of Snow. It’s one of my lavatory books and is filled with all sorts
of trivial information that help pass the countless hours I used to spend in
there prior to the successful All Bran
challenge and roughage rich health regime.
British weather, is, or so it says in the foreward, some of
the most exciting in the world. To be brutally frank, I beg to differ. But
there again meteorologists in corduroy jackets with elbow patches would say
that, but the next time one of them doing the weather on TV cheerfully comes
out with the cliché “coldest since records began” my foot is going straight
through the plasma screen. I’ll teach them.
Today’s picture by the way taken on Craig-y-Don beach. Just
out of focus in the background are a number of ice bergettes on their way down
from the even colder seas in the North, and
now that the Gulf Stream is about to stop (it’s called climate change,
not global warming, climate change) , it looks like we’ll be seeing more and
more of them and less and less blue thighed Brits in the sea so I suppose there
is a cloud to every silver lining – or whatever the saying is.
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