Met Office cancels weather
WARNING FOR FESTIVAL-GOERS”.
I'm amused by the different ways in which a news headline can be [mis]understood, depending on the layout of words on the page or increasingly, the screen. A mis-read headline is the starting point for this 'rambling' blog. No conspiracy theories, just some imaginative speculation and a few facts. The weather is of course a neutral phenomenon until qualified as good or bad, but we do also hear people say “a lot of weather we've been having”.
So from the above headline, we could read that the head office of the Metropolitan Police has today cancelled The Weather, but warned party-goers, protestors or people out on a 'spree', that they will bring it back if there is any hint of public disorder. It's just coincidental of course that the abbreviation 'Met' is an abbreviation of both the weather and the London police force. Here in Cymru, the police are not a 'force' as such. The word Heddlu means Peace Host ('hedd': peace and 'llu'; host or throng), as in a Host of Angels, and has a Biblical origin. On the other hand, if the above headline referred to the offices of the NY Metropolitan Opera, that would put a damper on some Wagnerian performance maybe. I digress.
But just suppose the weather forecast was indeed used for political purposes by a totalitarian regime. The long history of the relationship between walking, protest and anarchy is well documented (see Solnit below). Well known examples of such protest are the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass (1932) and Reclaim the Streets (from 1995). Town planners have wittingly or unwittingly been able to curtail unwanted gatherings, and the traditional stroll through town centres has been limited by the mass movement of retail to out-of-town locations which are, around the world, car-friendly and pedestrian averse. Typically there is little if any pavement access between shops, cinemas or other places of entertainment. Recent stays in budget hotels across the UK were acceptable as long as I only wanted to cross the car park to an adjacent supermarket. To go further on foot to access other local amenities required negotiating dual carriageways and roundabouts surrounded by safety fences, weather permitting. I wasn't sure if the barriers were there to protect pedestrians from the traffic, or to prevent them from finding an easy walking route from A to B.
Much collective action is misrepresented and under-reported in Establishment news media. Any notion of protest could so easily be undermined quickly by manipulating official weather forecasts. Yellow warning of strong wind set to knock revellers off their feet. Forecasts could conceivably be used to scare populations into staying at home in front of their televisions, with no need to go out, as groceries - indeed everything - can be bought on-line. But with current climate change, the truth of extreme weather events is of course an increasingly tragic reality for so many around the world, governments' responses ranging from initiative to indifference. A timely parallel with the car/climate conundrum.
If pedestrian protests have been largely prevented, car-carrying complainers are now emerging here in Cymru. Cymru is leading the field in pedestrian safety, with 20mph speed limits in built up areas from September 2023. Those who disagree, those who don't seem to be concerned about the risk of injuring a child or somebody infirm are, in protest, planning to tie red ribbons to the front of their vehicles: a sarcastic reminder of the requirement in the 1890s for someone to walk with a red flag ahead of motorised vehicles. I can already imagine which makes of car will be most represented in this Protest of the Entitled, with traits such as toxic masculinity evident too no doubt. I leave you, the reader, to fill in the gaps with your own stereotypes of vehicles and drivers, and look forward with wry amusement at the extent to which these people will identify, even incriminate themselves by their ribbons.
SPEEDING DRIVER IN WELSH VILLAGE NAMED BY POLICE. What name did they give the village?
LINKS
A Short History of Walking | (garrisoninstitute.org)
Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit: 9780140286014 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
Red flag traffic laws - Wikipedia
The Counter Revolution of the Rambling Rodneys (cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com)
Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City | The MIT Press Reader
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I look forward to your comments. Also it would be nice to know where you are in the world. Thanks for reading.