Weather or not…

Cor, ain’t it marvellous, it’s only February and the sun’s shining, the flowers flowering and the rabbits... Well the rabbits are doing what they always do at this time of year...hiding from blood crazed, shotgun toting members of the aristocracy. Except they shouldn’t be: it’s only February and that should mean deep snow of the right kind to turn bus, tube and train timetables into some-kind of national lottery. This is seriously weird.

Just when you’ve got used to the idea that it is always cold in February, we get a scorcher of a week that fills up the pavement cafes and creates panic in the souls of ice cream vendors who just knew that it would snow and now fearfully order extra stock. Come July, when everyone wants to head off on their hols you’ve got a fair chance of blizzards and the autumn is less likely to be full of mists and mellow fruitfulness than horizontal hailstones the size of pigeons. November could see skiers in Cherry Tree Woods, while Christmas will be just the time to fire up the barbie and bask in the sunshine. Yes, welcome to the greatest of British traditions, the weather.

Open season

What’s so great about ‘British weather’ is the sheer unpredictability of it all. No German can expect such things. They know that the summer will be hot, the winters cold and the rest of the year largely irrelevant. If you’re American you know that it never rains in Southern California, but it pisses down in the autumn in Vermont. Not even the Aussies, in the land of the bouncing low fat burger, where men can’t give a XXXX for anything other than frozen lager, can count on anything out to lunch and unpredictable about their weather. The Japanese have miniaturised weather, the Russians have sub-zero winters and the Kiwis, well the Kiwis have sheep.

Hot air

According to mad scientists everywhere we are suffering from global warming and this means melting ice caps, strange weather and loads of free lunches for politicians to talk about what they are not going to do about it. They reckon it’s all down to excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases wafting up into the sky and sitting there like an electric blanket, upsetting the rabbits, the flowers and the weather forecasters. The scientists blame cars. Me, I blame the sheep.

It is a little known fact that your average sheep farts its own weight in greenhouse gases every day. These uncontrolled vapours waft ever upwards until the world is shrouded in sheep farts, giving us heat waves in February and snow in July. The obvious solution is to point the finger of blame where it should be pointed and that is at the Kiwis, Welsh, and anyone else who thinks sheep are a nice thing to have in the raw, uncooked, baa-ing around the field state. But there is a scientific solution; cloning.

Hello dolly

If mad scientists can clone Dolly the Sheep, then they must be able to shake a few test tubes and come up with non-farting sheep. These beasts would continue to do all the usual sheepish things like eating grass, making a noise and acting stupid, but without farting their own weight in greenhouse gasses everyday. This would be a major leap forward for man, woman and alien kind because it would mean that we could eat more lamb and stop worrying about global warming. And if I’m wrong? Well, I’m fed up with freezing to death at the bus stop every February so a bit of sun is nice for a change and, besides, what on earth would we talk about if we didn’t have the weather? Politics perhaps? Now that would be seriously weird...

(P.S. last month saw National Prune Day and we all know all about prunes, so maybe the sheep aren’t to blame after all.)

(PPS Did you know that the back of the knee is a cure for jetlag?)