For some reason, I always find myself paying attention to weather presenters. Perhaps it is the fact that I have had an interest in meteorology since I was a small child.
Or maybe it’s the break in style compared with the rest of the news bulletin. Weather forecasters have much more freedom to express their personality than news, sport or business presenters do. Whatever it is, some weather forecasters are among my favourite television personalities.
Tomasz Schafernaker
Tomasz Schafernaker has long counted among my favourites. Many will have seen him in the proper news following his gaffe where he accidentally gave the middle finger gesture while on the air.
It is by no means the first time Tomasz Schafernaker has been involved in on-air hilarity. There is, for instance, his reaction to being told about his “frozen ball”.
Most infamously of all, there was his slip-up when he talked about Glastonbury’s “muddy shite”.
Laura Tobin
Laura Tobin came into focus after this astonishing incident.
The initial gaffe is surreal and hilarious. Her reaction is adorable. But the way she copes with it is the most impressive. If you tuned in five seconds after the bulletin had started, you would never know anything had happened! What a professional.
Rob McElwee
Cool as a cucumber, Rob McElwee would announce the apocalypse with a shrug of the shoulders. He is often so laid back I suspect he has had quite a good lunch! Here he is talking about severe winter weather in his normal unruffled manner.
Francis Wilson
Rob McElwee may sometimes look like he has enjoyed his lunch, but Francis Wilson looks like he has been lunching all day long. He is not a great forecaster though. His tendency to just list a series of consecutive numbers instead of actually giving you a temperature leaves the viewer perplexed as to whether to wear a duffle coat or hot pants.
Still, you can’t fault his personality. Here is a rare clip of Rory Bremner being funny, impersonating Francis Wilson.
Daniel Corbett
But the granddaddy of weather presenting personalities has to be Daniel Corbett. His enthusiasm for any kind of weather event is surely unrivalled, and his descriptions are without question the most entertaining around.
Even Tomasz Schafernaker seems to think Daniel Corbett’s style is the way to go, judging by the way he signed off from this bulletin.
A voice from the clock says, “You’re not gonna get tired”
My bed is a pool and the walls are on fire
So begins the new single by Animal Collective, ‘Summertime Clothes’. Their solution to being unable to sleep in the oppressive heat is to go out and walk through the city (only to be confronted by the smell of trash).
I used to do that when I was younger. I’d slip out of the house and wander around as dawn broke. It’s quite a strange experience to walk around at 4am, when it’s broad daylight and there is no-one around. It’s good, but it doesn’t help you get to sleep. But if you stay in bed, by the time it cools down sufficiently (if it ever does) the sun is ready to rise again and you face the other problem of sleeping at summer — it’s too damn bright.
Longer days. I used to like that aspect of summer. This year I am not so sure. Several times I have woken up convinced that it must be morning, so intense is the sunlight. I raise my head only to look at the clock and see that it is something like 4:30am and I have had barely had two hours of sleep. Back to sleep I go, waking up every so often because of the brightness. I hide my head under my blanket, but that only makes the overbearing heat worse.
This isn’t the first time I have struggled with the summer climate. Three years ago I wrote a short and simple article entitled “I hate summer“. It got a bit of reaction at first. Later on it sporadically attracted further comments. There would perhaps be a small trickle during our winter, when wilting Antipodeans would vent. When it becomes summer in the northern hemisphere more people join in.
Now it seems to have turned into a bit of a self-organising support group — a collection of like-minded people who are united only by the fact that presumably they all one day turned to Google and said “I hate summer“. There are now a few regulars that leave comments on that post, which recently passed the 100 comments mark. It’s been one of those unexpected successes of this website.
It’s good to know that you’re not the only one who dislikes the summer. Many like the sun and the heat. In fact, it’s normally taken as a given that hot weather is a good thing. Not for me.
To my fragile Scottish complexion, the sun is just like a giant death ray in the sky. There is the small fact that it provides almost all of the energy on our planet. But I’d never guess it, given that it seems to sap all of the energy out of me.
Then again, I don’t mind sunlight so much. A bit of sun can’t be bad. It keeps those vitamin D levels in check. On a pleasant day I like to walk in the sun. A cool, sunny winter day can’t be beaten.
The real problem with summer is the intensity of the sun and the heat that comes with it. In fact, the sun could be away completely and it will be even worse. Is there anything worse than an overcast, cloudy, rainy, muggy, humid day? It is unbearably bad.
It’s not just the high temperatures, which might be bearable for a period. It’s the fact that once you get too hot, you reach some kind of tipping point, and it’s impossible to escape it for the rest of the day. A cool drink, for instance, provides only transient relief.
Some people say that winter is just as bad because it is too cold. That may be so in a way, but there is something evil about summer’s heat in that it is truly impossible to escape it. After all, if it’s too cold during winter, it’s not a problem — just throw another layer of clothes on. If it’s too warm during summer, there is not much you can do about it without getting arrested.
Moreover, my nose turns into a tap. It is not just the hay fever, which I am not sure if I have. But I certainly suffer a lot from Achoo Syndrome. I get that during winter too, if it’s sunny enough. But when it’s cooler, sneezing is something you can shake off fairly easily. During summer you cannot have a sneezing fit without having to reach for a towel as a result of the perspiration it causes.
More nose-related woe comes when you consider the summery stench. The smell of rubbish has already been alluded to by Animal Collective. But more than that, you cannot take a simple trip to the supermarket without your nostrils being assaulted by the BO of some middle-aged fat man who thinks it is the done thing to walk around with his top off. The sight is equally bad, especially when so many people walk around thinking nothing of the fact that they’ve turned the colour of the Forth Bridge.
And for the sake of taste and decency, I am not even going to go into the problems I encounter down there.
As if to prove that the world really has it in for me, I am convinced that my room is by far the hottest in the whole house. I can leave the window open all night and you’d never guess. But if I go for a walk around the house, it feels positively breezy, even in rooms where the window is clamped shut.
The really worrying thing is the fact that all of this summer malarkey adversely affects me so much despite the fact that I live quite far north in a relatively cool country. Indeed, I live on the coast of a peninsula of an island. Here I sit writing this a mere ten minute walk away from the North Sea, struggling to cope with a temperature that is apparently not higher than the teens. I can’t imagine how I would feel if I lived closer to the equator or far inland. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I am in two minds about Christmas. I adore the day itself. And despite the fact that I am a Pastafarian, I feel no contradiction in celebrating Christmas, despite what Malc says.
After all, without Christmas — or any similar winter festival — these months would be fairly rotten all round. It is good sense to inject some cheer into the long, cold, dark winter nights. It is, of course, no coincidence that Christmas just so happens to fall at the same time as an ancient Pagan festival.
But while I enjoy Christmas Day, what I really don’t like is the run-up to Christmas. This brings nothing but stress and pain. I don’t see the point in getting stressed out over something that is supposed to make you feel better. So I tend to eschew traditional elements of pre-Christmas such as Christmas cards and the like.
This year, the pre-Christmas period has brought with it an added stress: the slow and humiliating death of my workplace, Woolworths. The shelves have been largely empty for weeks now, and products have been replaced by tacky, generic (Hilco-supplied) “closing down” posters. Friends and customers frequently tell me how sad it is to see the store like that, and I have to agree with them. Christmas cheer, like many Woolworths products, has been in short supply this year.
Even though I wasn’t exactly pinning my career hopes on Woolies, I am still terribly sorry to see it go. When I got my first card this year, though, it cheered me up enough to decide to participate the the Christmas card tradition. It looks like other people have done the same. My tally of cards received has gone up from five in 2006 to nine in 2007 to twenty this year. Even then, I have given out more cards than I have received, which is unusually festive of me.
So in that spirit, I want to wish all of this blog’s readers all the very best for the Christmas period and beyond.
Apologies, too, for the radio silence. I have been extraordinarily busy recently. Despite the imminent closure of Woolies, I’m currently working there more than ever. I will be straight back to work on Boxing Day, but I won’t complain too much. I just have to make the most of it because in another couple of weeks the work won’t be there at all. I will write more about Woolworths after we close down (which, incidentally, is on 5 January, although we’ll be sticking around for a few days to convert the unit back into an empty shell for someone to buy).
As well as that, I have been juggling a couple of other projects and of course I am on the job hunt for real now. So spare time has been in short supply, meaning that the blog has been put on the back burner. This is an uncertain period of my life, and I still need to work out how the blog will fit in to my future plans. Once I figure it out, activity on the blog will hopefully increase. I have a few posts I want to squeeze out before the new year so I don’t intend on it remaining silent any more at all.
In the meantime, to bring this post back to its original point, have a merry Christmas. (Or Chrifsmas.)
I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas you know. I really don’t mind it at all. I’m not a total Scrooge (who, incidentally, wasa fellow Langtonian). There are very good reasons to try and enjoy yourself at this time of year. It’s cold, dark and miserable. What else can you do except make the most of it?
Except that people don’t enjoy themselves at Christmas time. They just get totally stressed out. That’s what I hate about Christmas. It’s not Christmas itself. It’s the whole fuss that surrounds it. It completely misses the point for me, which is to cheer yourself up during the winter. Ideally, the run-up to Christmas would last for a week, rather than three months. I haven’t even started any of my Christmas shopping yet — mostly because I haven’t had the time. Most Christmas traditions completely pass me by.
But now I am faced with a dilemma. Colleagues have been giving me Christmas cards. It must be at least four years since I personally received a Christmas card. For me, exchanging Christmas cards is one of the most insincere things that people do at this time of year, and that really is saying something.
I mean, I never receive Christmas cards from my friends, and I never give them cards either. Does that mean I wish them a rubbish Christmas? Of course it doesn’t. It just means I’m not wasting as much paper. I can just wish people a Merry Christmas anyway. Why give them a card? Often the process of gift-giving is completely avoided as well. Two of my friends ceremoniously exchange five pound notes every year.
The only time I’ve ever received Christmas cards was at school. Our primary school had a little mock post box set up next to the office. People would drop their cards in the post box in the morning before the bell rang and the cards would be delivered to our class later on in the day. That is a ridiculously inefficient system if you think about it. You could just, you know, give the cards to your classmates. After all, they are in the same room as you!
Still, it was a fun game to play. I suppose it was meant to be teaching us about the postal system. But our primitive postal system had no stamps and the cards were always delivered on time, so it wasn’t very realistic. Anyway, the whole ceremony of it all meant that it was very easy to see who had — and, more importantly, hadn’t — received a card from certain individuals. Of course, this just meant that everybody ended up having to send a Christmas card to everybody else.
One year I also sent a Christmas card to absolutely everybody in my class in primary 7. I fancied myself as somebody who was quite good at dealing with the organisation of this sort of thing, but I was prone to the odd administrative error. I ended up sending somebody a card twice. This person happened to be a girl, so you can imagine the jolly japes that came my way.
Anyway, the fact that everybody sent everybody else a Christmas card kind of underlines the insincerity of Christmas cards to me. They aren’t really a way to wish somebody a happy Christmas. They are just an evil social convention which we are all dragged kicking and screaming into. It’s not just me who says this. It is common to hear somebody describe their relationship with somebody else as “Christmas cards”. “Christmas cards” means, “I’m not in touch with him at all and I actually hate his guts.”
When I went into the staff room and saw a pile of Christmas cards sprawled across the table I was struck with fear. I knew I had a difficult decision ahead of me. I was hoping just to “not notice” that there were any cards for me so that I could avoid having to write any back. In fact, I didn’t even look to see if there were any for me.
But today a colleague actually told me to go and get the card that was waiting for me in the staff room! I now had no choice but to collect my card. Card? Hah! Turns out I actually have five. And goodness knows how many more are to come. Once the first person put a card there, a domino effect was set in motion. Soon enough I’ll have cards from people that I’ve never even met.
What is even more unsettling is the fact that these five cards come from such a wide range of people. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly be more diverse. It is certainly not the five people that I speak to most often. In fact, there is not a toot from most of the people that I actually often speak to. No surprises there then!
So here is my dilemma. Should I just write cards to the five people who wrote me cards? That would seem grudging, as though I was avoiding Christmas cards. That is true, but it’s probably seen as a bit rude. So I could write cards to the five people, then some more other people. But then the people who didn’t get a card might get offended. I could write cards to everybody, but that would seem insincere, and I would also have to write cards to people that I don’t really like.
The only other option is not to write any cards at all, but is that really a viable option? No matter what course of action I take, I will be committing some kind of horrendous faux pas that will undoubtedly be generating conversations whenever I’m not around. Apart from that, I can only phone in sick every day between now and Christmas, but that probably wouldn’t make me very popular with the boss.
Seriously. What’s wrong with just enjoying Christmas instead of having to deal with all of this insincere crap?
The first of September. So we’ve exited the summer, where people only celebrate blogging for no good reason, and which is far too hot anyway. It definitely felt like winter the other day when it was pitch black at 9pm. An uni starts again in a couple of weeks. Gah.
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