weather report

 

The “anthropomorphic” naming of extreme weather events makes them all the more threatening. They are bad enough anyway, and seemingly more frequent and more severe with climate change, but personifying them seems to add another layer of evil to scare us all witless. Randomly, I recalled 1970s singer Hurricane Smith, but one named after him should be “Storm Norman” from his actual handle. 

I did however know a man called Storm, not evil in the slightest. I don’t think we will ever see his name [“Storm Storm”] on the above list. He gave me a lift to the local astronomical society every Friday night. A concrete clubhouse between the observatory domes had been a wartime gun emplacement, I remember how cold and damp it always was. It was where I met one Patrick Moore, a guest speaker one evening, and another, one Jocelyn Bell who had discovered pulsars. I must have been about sixteen, long before my Friday nights took on another significance in the later days of poets. Appropriately to his name, Storm became a published meteorologist. I can think of no better aptronym.  

The club also led to my first ever camping expedition, during a cold Easter. Another member and I explored Gogledd Cymru in his old Riley Elf or Wolseley Hornet. I forget which. It was a posh Mini with a boot, decades before Minis became upmarket, upscaled and no longer “mini”.  Looking back, it seems implausible that it accommodated our camping gear. At Llanfairfechan we were flooded out of the tent while ascending the Carneddau ridge, utterly unsuitably clad. My first experience of hypothermia, when all I wanted was to crawl behind a rock and sleep. Experienced mountaineers urged us to retreat, to the welcome of the site's clubhouse floor, the tent by then inaccessible.

These memories were rekindled during an extended power cut following another named event. With no phone, no internet, no entertainment media and no heating, it felt as if we were on a limb from the rest of civilisation. Others had it much worse. Before the arrival of Storm Dastardly, unadvertised “civil defence” notifications blared out from phones before the signal was lost. We fleetingly feared the end of civilisation too. I thought of those days before most had central heating. Intricate frost patterns grew inside the windows. The bed was icily cold. That was normal then.

Before power was lost, I happened  upon a television documentary following the life of a boy growing up in an off-grid village in Himachal Pradesh. The struggles he and his family faced with fortitude presented a timely and sobering challenge to our comfortable complacency in the west. Cooking by torchlight on the gas hob, I thought of his partially sighted mother providing the most delicious looking chapatis from a makeshift camping stove. I could almost smell them; if only they had developed the technology for “odourvision” by now. 

It’s an ill wind that at least inspired this blog post to blow in.

LINKS

Aptronym - Wikipedia

Journeys of discovery: Jocelyn Bell Burnell and pulsars

Elf Hornet Register