JET STREAM

"It's happened again!" said my Dad, gravely.

"What?"

"The jet stream."

Every year we get this, I mean literally, the conversation and the phenomenon. Apparently, the polar jet stream is somehow twisted over the Atlantic in such a way that all of the USA and Canada lies above it, and all of us on the other side of the pond, are trapped beneath this meandering ribbon of fast flowing air. As a result, being anywhere in North America today probably feels like an Arctic survival exercise, while over here the weather is mild and wet: disappointing versus dramatic.

"It happened exactly like this last year!" he lamented, "And it stayed like it for months. I hope we don't have that again."

Indeed. It resulted in terrible floods, a stormy old Christmastime and icy, snowbound, frozen misery for our American cousins.

Not that my Dad's naturally concerned about our American cousins. I expect he's thinking about the allotment.

It must be time for the media to go into meteorological meltdown as well mustn't it? Like the town criers you never asked for, the tabloids usually start shouting: 'COLD SNAP TO HIT UK' and 'THE BIG FREEZE IS COMING', next to pictures of celebrities eating bits of kangaroo in the Australian jungle.

Why is it always a cold 'snap' and a heat 'wave'? With its terrible jaws, the cold waits in the shadows? Meanwhile the lovely heat pours over us? There it goes, undulating and cascading through the long hot summer until suddenly, SNAP! Your feet are ice-cubes, your pipes are bursting and you have to dress yourself twice to leave the house.

The Cold and The Heat are not actual things anyway are they? They're just relative terms for measuring a temperature - and there's a pretty good system for that, nicely in place.

Saying it's cold today is just another way of saying it's colder than I expected or prepared for, the temperature is uncomfortably low, or help me I've run out of other things to talk about.

"I don't want to think about Christmas anyway," said my Mum, clearing the table, "Whether it's unseasonably mild or it's freezing."

"Hassle," I said thoughtfully, staring at the water jug. I was wondering how to change the subject given that we were dangerously close to The Christmas Question.

"How are you getting on with your secret santa?" said my Dad. I grumbled internally.

Cold out, isn't it?