WEATHER TALK

It's the kind of day when you talk about the weather. As I was walking back from lunch, I saw a guy struggling with an umbrella while the wind blew up and underneath it, throwing rain in his face. I noted with a wry smile that he was wearing sunglasses.

Surely this can only happen on this 'sceptred-isle' of ours? One minute the sky is blue and the sun reminds you that there was a thing called summer, the next you're walking through curtains of rain with wet knees and a broken brolly.

I think the weather shapes a great deal of our Englishness. In a meeting earlier, I had to dial in a German colleague, Sabine, while we waited for the other attendees to show up.

"Hi Sabine," I said, cheerily. "How are you?"
"Oh, fine thanks," replied Sabine, crackling over the conference phone.

There was an awkward pause. I was debating with myself whether to ask the question - the one question that would leap like a march hare into the mind of every British person in the same slightly awkward situation. For centuries this question has kept us victory-rolling through the small-talk-holding-pattern, and we, we blessed race of tea-drinking cricket-loving, umbrella-waving bowler hats, we take to it like Biggles to a Spitfire. I looked up to the grim sky over the car park.

"How's the weather today, Sabine?" I asked, politely.

One of the up-sides to inclement weather (other than putting off potential invaders across the English Channel of course) is that we get rainbows. I saw one today, just after passing Mr RayBan-Umbrella-Man. It arched over Tilehurst, bright and bold against the grey sky.

Do rainbows make you feel younger? Well they do, me - I always feel about 5 years old and enchanted by the strange coloured bands in the sky. Oh I know how they work, I've a degree in physics after all, but somehow rainbows are still a bit like magic, painted across the sky to remind me that hope is still alive, even in the darkest of storms.