May April showers bring May flowers as the saying goes?
At least we hope so. As in many other languages, English is full of phrases and idioms related to the weather. Perhaps more than others because the English weather is supposed to change five times a day.
Oscar Wilde said that conversation about it was the last refuge of the unimaginative, while Bill Bryson noed that its most striking characteristic is that there isn't much of it. The weather - and the British obsession with talking about it - has been puzzling outsiders for decades.
According to recent research, 94% of British respondents admit to having conversed about the weather in the past six hours, while 38% say they have in the past 60 minutes.
Is there something about the nation’s weather that makes
it worthy of discussion, or is it simply a cultural foible? And do any
other nationalities share this peculiar conversational trait?
Stormy skies
Several features of Britain’s geography make the weather the way it is: mild, changeable, and famously unpredictable.
Britain’s
position at the edge of the Atlantic places it at the end of a storm
track – relatively narrow zones over oceans that storms travel down,
driven by the prevailing winds. “These storms are feeding on the
temperature difference from the equator to the pole,” says Douglas
Parker, joint Met Office professor of meteorology at the University of
Leeds.
As the warm and cold air fly towards and over each other,
the earth’s rotation creates cyclones – and the UK bears the tail end of
them.
Then there is the
Gulf Stream,
which makes the British climate milder than it should be, given its
northern latitude, and the fact that the UK is made up of islands,
meaning there is a lot of moisture in the air. “Water in the atmosphere
makes the weather particularly unpredictable,” Parker says.
The variability means residents never know quite what to expect. Snow in summer? T-shirts in winter? Recently,
the hottest-ever November day
was recorded in mid-Wales, with temperatures hitting a balmy 22.4C.
“It’s much more unpredictable than the climate of many countries,” says
Trevor Harley, chair of cognitive psychology at the University of
Dundee, who runs a
website devoted to the British weather. “There’s always something happening – and if there isn’t, there is the promise.”
It
is these types of extremes that generate much of the debate on online
forums about the British weather (yes, they do exist!). The
British Weather Newsgroup,
for example, has been running since the mid-1990s and was started as a
forum for enthusiasts to discuss scientific aspects of the British
weather.
Today, almost all aspects of the weather are up for
debate, although there are two major themes, says Harley. One is
speculation about – and a desire for – severe weather, such as a
traditional white Christmas – never mind the fact the UK has only
experienced a widespread, Dickensian-like Christmas snow
four times in the past 51 years.
The other theme is nostalgia for the weather of the past, which
Harley notes is often at odds with the reality. “In my memory, every
summer’s day in the 60s was hot and sunny with unbroken sunshine. In
fact, this could only have been a few days in a few months; summers in
the 60s were unusually cool and unsettled,” he says.
Coded conversations
Many
of the day-to-day conversations British people initiate about the
weather, however, are more mundane. Comments like “cold, isn’t it?”
don’t even particularly demand a full response; a grunt of agreement
will suffice.
