On Saturday Caught in a fog of dashed-off forecasts

WHAT an upside-down week, weather-wise, at least. Down in our usually snug protected valley you don scarf and gloves because of the chill fog, then you climb a 1,000 feet into what would normally be the nippy and wind-whipped uplands only to find yourself stripping down to shirtsleeves because it’s so hot and sunny.

The autumnal inversions we’ve been seeing this week represent weather-events of the more scenic kind – if, that is, you get above the mists and are able to gaze down upon what looks like a new and rising ocean licking around the upper flanks of the hills.

Four days in a row I managed this ascent from murk to magic on my electric mountain bike. As the last wisps lurk at your heels at around 900 feet and a hot sun is suddenly warming your shoulders, you are rewarded with acute feelings of wellbeing. In just 20 minutes you’ve hauled yourself out of deep midwinter into something that looks and feels like summer. It’s a natural high, that ticks every nuance of the word.

Here in the countryside, the weather is a very important thing. It plays a role in our daily lives. In urban environments that’s probably not quite as true. Yes, if it’s sweltering or raining heavily in a place like London people will act accordingly, but a great deal of city life is spent indoors, in shops, offices, tube trains and the like.

Rural life, on the other hand, is closely linked to the natural world. Many of us live here precisely because of the great outdoors. So fluctuations in whatever the Atlantic Ocean throws at us are bound to loom large in our lives.

I know for a fact that many of us depend on the nightly forecasts of Spotlight’s David Braine or those of Ian Fergusson of Points West. Their weather maps of the region dictate what we will be doing the next day.

But listen to BBC national radio like I do, and you’ll be treated to a much reduced meteorological offering. At Radio Four’s flagship Today programme, for example, the main presenters are forever squeezing the weather report half out of existence. There must be millions of us who listen to this early morning programme in bed, wondering what the day will bring, only to have our all-important weather information reduced to a galloping 30 seconds as the forecaster attempts to describe every climactic condition from Helston to the Hebrides.

One imagines those Londonbased presenters don’t really get to experience weather much, unless they’re on holiday. What’s it to them if a slight change in the forecast changes that day’s agenda for thousands of British farmers? Especially when that forecast is delivered alongside what some cynical journalists, like me, know as “The Great God News”.

A news editor told me years ago that weather “just happens” – it’s what people do that matters. Weather can’t be interviewed or questioned, voted for or fired. Meteorology only becomes an Important Thing if it affects people, as in flooding their homes. Then the news editor would have been able to drag some be-suited schmuck in front of a camera to explain why flood defences weren’t up to scratch.

But for millions of us, knowing what the weather’s going to be doing over the next 24 hours is important. Readers don’t need a list of such people, but I’ll give the example of my son-in-law who’s been working on a roof recently. Around a quarter of a million people work in construction in the UK and most of them will be interested in what the sky is going to chuck at them. As will farmers, etc, etc.

Okay, so nowadays we can look up forecasts on our smartphones, but why should you when there’s already a fabulous medium called radio which you can listen to while driving your builder’s van to work, or your tractor, or whatever?

Throughout my working life I have observed this slight conflict – the gulf that lies between what my chosen industry does in its bid to reflect life

‘I have long observed the gulf between what mass media says and lives actually lived’

on the planet, and the lives actually experienced by most of its inhabitants. The inevitability is that journalists working in those big newsrooms live in a bubble of their own making. So do politicians. It’s what happens when a solitary human is sucked up to be part of a very big machine.

Downgrading the importance of weather is just a tiny example of a bunker mentality to be seen throughout the media. I constantly find myself asking: “Do they really believe people in Britain are thinking that way?” I asked it back in 2016 when most media commentators and many politicians were saying Brexit would fail to take us out of the EU. I ask it nowadays when so much “woke-ism” is taken for granted as if to say: “This is what we think, so everyone must.”

Whether I do, or not, is of no matter. It’s the arrogance of the assumption that gets my goat. And the goats of millions of others.

But now... to climb out of the murk into the sunlit clarity of the world above, despite the Today programme telling me all of Britain will be “Mainly foggy.”