STICKY PLASTIC WEATHER

Someone posted on social media about how the weather presenters used to use yellow, sun-shaped stickers on the weather map, and now they just use gigantic red-zones of danger and death.

I remember the sticker days. A man in a grey suit and dark-rimmed glasses would hold a pile of plastic symbols in one hand, and stick them one-by-one to an actual board behind him while he explained which areas would be dripped on by a cartoon black cloud with a giant blue rain drop. Sometimes the stickers would slip off the country, which was always a giggle.

The computer-aided heatmap of today is much more precise. That’s how we know we’re in the ‘amber zone’ today, and not in the dark red, boiling trapezoid of central London and the Midlands. There might be a climate change agenda in the way it’s displayed (which is, I think, what the poster was getting at) but nevertheless, I think it’s much more helpful to have the precise information.

I am at home. We’ve rigged up blinds and pulled all the curtains, plus I’ve got the fans on. I’ll also run a shallow bath of cold water later, just for sort of paddling in. Right now, my thermometer says it’s 25°C inside and 27°C outside, but the prediction is that it will go up by 5-7 degrees in the next couple of hours.

The Twenty-First Century weatherman (open necked shirt, computer graphics, friendly manner) actually said that ‘typically, thousands of people die in heatwaves like this, and there’s no reason to expect this to be any different’.

And that’s it, isn’t it? We don’t live in the days of the sticky plastic weather symbols any more. We live in the age of forest fires every summer in Europe, of Australia gradually becoming uninhabitable, and of days in the UK that are hotter than the Western Sahara, where real people, our neighbours and friends, are likely to become seriously ill or even die from the heat.

Well anyway. Hot and getting hotter. Take care out there.