I know precious little about the high priesthood of meteorologists, which is not surprising for the son of a family that holds all “soft” sciences in ancestral scorn. A “soft” science, to the Drood mind, is one in which the thing being studied tends to reinvent itself, like Alice’s croquet mallet, just when you thought you’d got a fix on it, thus forcing you either to reinterpret your observations or change your method of calibration. This is why my suspicion of psychologists is almost equal to their suspicion of each other, and why I tend to associate sociologists with statisticians as one might associate a hanging judge with a bottle of whiskey.

What makes meteorology a soft science, you might ask? Well, anyone who believes you can make an honest living out of largely dishonest predictions is more in the market for sows ears than silken purses. Of course, the right honourable conclave of meteorologists will baulk at being herded into the same pen as graphologists, geomancers and economists. They will insist that they measure only the hardest of data and rely on predictive models that are tried and proven by decades of priestly dedication to the acribic scribbling of the anemometer and the barograph. At which I merely raise my leaden index upon hearing the words “predictive models” and murmur discretely: “I rest my case, your Honour.”

You see, to justify their bread and butter, their very raison d’être, meteorologists must pander most unhealthily to our pathetic desire for the reassuring cosiness of a predictable future. History has seriously let us down, the present sucks, and so the best we can hope for is a reasonably dry weekend.

Psychologists (but what do they know, right?) will tell us that this focus on an immediate physical future is the natural reflex of those who are faced with too much information for which they have no responsibility and in which they are no more than passive and impotent stakeholders. Funny that, because they would tell us the same if we fixated on the non-immediate future of winning at the lottery, the marriageable prospects of Scandinavian royalty or the next edition of our favourite soap opera. Either way, our economists have failed us, our philosophers have deserted us and our politicians are rudderless, so we would at least like to know if we can have a nice Barbie on Sunday.

“You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows”, sang Dylan, and he was dead right there: because one weatherman won’t do anymore, now you need a whole channel full of them. They prance around their pompous three-dimensional charts like a bunch of ballet-dancing impresarios in suits. The ten-o-clock TV meteo-person has become the apotheosis of the profession; no longer merely reporting the weather, but actually seeming to “make” it. With a sweeping theatrical gesture of the left arm, our hero draws an enormous low-pressure front in from the North Atlantic to squat Belgium for another month. What assurance, what power ... godlike!

While on the subject of squishy science and the media, I cannot help but notice how the expansion of soft sciences thrives on that softest of socio-statistical vectors, Facebook. To paraphrase Churchill, “there are lies, damn lies, statistics  ... and then there is the internet”. To connect the dots, and so as not to appear as if my pen is wandering, I draw your attention to a recent development on Facebook – sociology’s second home, a trove of meteorological hearsay, an anthropological “casework in progress” and a statistical “goldmine” (whatever that means) – which has begun to witness a rather odd series of viral allusions to rain.

Whether in the form of Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” or of Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat”, those who “Just Can’t Stand the Rain” have teamed up with those who walk “in the Rain with the One” they love, or number “Raindrops on Roses” among their “Favourite Things” to flood that social network with pop nostalgia of unsurpassed humidity. The rain itself has been “Red”, “Black”, “Silver”, “Hard” and “Heavy”. The next step will be to associate it with bus stops, big enough umbrellas and suchlike ... At least we’ve so far been spared Rick Astley’s awful gabardine capers, but really ... this could run and run. The sound of rain on a car roof is instant nostalgia to countless millions. Why else would I drive a drop-top Alvis?

Those of us who actually lived through the sixties can’t remember them, while many of those who didn’t wish they had. Meanwhile the generation that grew up in the eighties have tried to convince the Twittering classes that theirs was truly a great decade, whereas almost anyone with more than half an active neuron knows this to be a lie. So what could be more pertinent to today’s youth, whose present is so ephemeral that they may end up without a past at all, than to convince them that the period they are living through is, at least meteorologically, historic? In short, it’s the perfect moment to invent a harmless musical roundelay of rainy day references to soften the soggy impact of a mythically blighted summer.

Because the origin of this little game is, of course, our group rejection or celebration of northern Europe’s wettest month of June in nearly half a century. The cause of this deluge is a subject of some dissent. Climatologists, who deal in centuries and whose science is thus, by its very nature, about as soft as soft-boiled eggs, insist that because the equator is heating up, everyone else’s wet weather is being squeezed up or down toward the poles, which means a very wet Benelux for the next millennium or so. Meteorologists say we’re currently in a negative pressure cycle that could take a few years to rebalance and astronomers tell us that solar flares are upsetting the Van Allen layer, which one should on no account do. You can take it or leave it as you please, but the fact is, it’s easier to shoot the messenger.

So one might suppose that those meteorologists who have become so media hungry as to appear to create rather than communicate the weather, will have only themselves to blame if we rise up and burn them at the stake ... assuming we can find enough dry kindling to get a blaze started. Yet only yesterday I chatted with a young girl in the queue at the local superette who wasn’t bothered at all: “The weather in June doesn’t count for me anyway”, she said, “It’s either revision or exams the whole month. And there’s nothing worse than swotting away while the sun shines outside, is there? So who cares if June is a washout? Just give me a sunny July and I’ll be happy as a lark.”

And, whether we have weather or whether we have climate ... I say “Amen” to that!


© Edwin Drood, July 2012