...come back another day!
As a youngster I used to sing this a lot but it seems relevant now with all the bad weather we have been getting for the past few weeks.
Weather. If, like me, you're from the UK you'll most likely hate it. If we're lucky we will get a few weeks of, mostly, unbroken sunshine but this will be followed by thunderstorms. Usually, for me anyway, the sunny spells happen during the exam period meaning I have to sit an exam in what can only be described as a makeshift sauna and when the exams finish and the holidays begin... rain and lots of it. Actually last summer was quite decent for weather. The sun lasted until halfway through a week that I was away. Everyone was wearing t-shirts, sat outside for at least two hours watching an open air Shakespeare play and the heavens opened. In true British style they carried on, with a few references to the weather much to everyones' amusement.
It is true though. British people will talk about the weather a lot. It is an ice breaker when you are in a lift with a stranger and accidentally make eye contact. When these conversations do happen we all think we are experts in the jet stream and turn into weathermen/women, predicting that it will snow next week. As with the actors in the Shakespeare play, we deal very well with rain, after complaining multiple times on various social networks, but as soon as there is even the slightest flake of snow, mayhem breaks out. Gridlock, flights cancelling and local councils saying they had enough grit for the winter but it all got used up earlier in the season and they will have more next year.
It all gets blamed on "The wrong kind of snow". The wrong kind of snow! Apparently our snow it too wet and other countries, who manage just fine with a foot of snow, get the right, drier, kind of snow.
A few years back whenever I woke up to a few centimetres of snow I would switch over to the local radio station praying that school would be closed. If it wasn't I would have to endure the slow, cold walk to school, dodging snowballs that seemed to get flung from nowhere. However, the most satisfying thing was to see a sheet of snow that nobody had walked on yet. It would look so perfect and pure until I at first walked slowly onto it, looking back at my footprints as a walk, then ran and made a path with no logical direction whatsoever.
It does seem as though we, in the UK, deal well with average temperatures and the odd shower but stop functioning in anything slightly extreme. If it's not snow it's a heatwave. Hosepipe bans make the news and all we can talk about is how hot it is. We once had a period of heavy rain during a hot spell. There were hosepipe bans dotted around the country and it got described as "The wettest drought". It does show that we do keep spirits high and maintain a sense of humour towards the weather. Also, as it is fairly rare for us to get hot weather, as soon as we have had three days of sun and temperatures above 12°C we rush to the shops to get burgers, sausages and chicken and rummage around our sheds looking for that long lost barbecue.
We will always complain about the weather, start conversation with absolute strangers about how cold it is and get caught out in a shower wishing we wore a coat. Plans will continue to be ruined and when told to "pack for the weather" for a weekend break we will still have to pack shorts, coats and a snow shovel. We will have to deal with it, and the tweets and Facebook statuses along the lines of "OMG IT'S SNOWING!!1!!one!!"
Although I have been pointing out that we don't deal very well with "extreme" weather it can be truly extreme. That is proven with the weather we are experiencing at the moment. It has at times got pretty bad in the North of England but it cannot be compared to what they are getting in the South of the country. The floods are terrible and are destroying people's homes and other possessions. Sinkholes have even opened meaning homes have had to be evacuated. These are thought to have been caused by the floods. Weather can be dangerous and we do have to spare a thought for all those that have been affected by the absolutely horrific weather we have been seeing in the past few weeks.
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