Extremely normal.

Came home from work, started typing an Email, fell asleep and woke up just before midnight. So, a few more hours of ‘z’ and I’ll be as chipper as seventies’ wallpaper. Why did we fall for the trick of selling us rolls of paper with lumps of wood still in it, and why did we believe it was fashionable to stick lumpy paper to our carefully-smoothed plaster walls and then paint it, rather than just leave the plaster lumpy then paint the walls?

But that’s a different post.

This one is about weather. All over the news is the shock-horror revelation that it might get cold in the UK in January. Trains will stop, the roads will collapse and the cheeeldren will be sucked into an alternate dimension and return as lizard people intent on killing us all (or did that already happen?).

It’s the UK. Reporting weather forecasts is pointless. The weather will do exactly as it damn well pleases. We have days where there is snow in the morning, dry ground under a warm sun at midday and hail in the evening, and that’s in May. All four seasons can show up in one day here, no matter what season the rest of the world is experiencing. I have often seen, and I bet many people have too, one side of a street wet with falling rain and the other side dry and in sunshine. Or rain pouring down the front window of my house while the sun pours in at the back.

You cannot study climate change in the UK and expect to be taken seriously. Nobody can take records that fast.

I have some new carnation plants in my otherwise silent greenhouse. I’ve grown them before, they are pleasing little plants, good ground cover and almost maintenance-free. There was one big one, about ten years ago, that got so confused by the cold-mild-cold-mild winter that it was in flower on Christmas day. It committed suicide the following year in desperation. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had uprooted itself and stomped off to throw itself on the compost heap.

There was a news report I recall from the mid nineties where a reporter, all skirt-suit and earnestly blank eyes, reported the desperate plight of the snowbound railways. In the background was a station that looked as if someone had dusted it with talcum powder, and she wasn’t wearing a coat, hat or gloves. A few years earlier I had driven a Hammerite-painted Mk 2 Fiesta with no door seals to a place called Cruden Bay through snowdrifts that looked like hills and along roads occasionally entirely obscured by drifting snow. There were years where the winter trek to the pub meant taking a shovel and years where the same trek could have been done in a T-shirt.

Climate changes. In the UK. it changes by the hour. This is not the place to be a climate expert, it will drive you insane. As indeed it appears to have done in East Anglia and other places too. The BBC has been insane for a long time, as soon as they started reporting a light dusting of snow as the End of Everything their insanity became clear. We weren’t supposed to get any snow. Global Warming was supposed to put an end to this inconvenience and allow us to grow Kiwi fruit and oranges on our patios. Last year it was a struggle to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse. My father used to grow them outdoors, and yet we are told global warming must be true because the army of drones says so?

Nothing coming is ‘extreme’ for UK weather. Normal? Nothing is normal here. The whole place is a madhouse as successive invaders have found. You can invade all you want, we just do what we do and you’ll adjust to fit in eventually. Resistance is futile. Well who did you think they used as a model for the Borg?

So we are to experience a relatively mild January and that is to be touted as an extreme weather event. The drones will believe it because the drones have no minds. They think what they are told to think.

And we’re supposed to save them? Sod them. Let the world burn off its stubble and let it start again without the dross and the weeds.

Let the world burn.