The weather forecast (snore)

If you’re in Britain, take a look outside. Look up, up a bit more. There. Looking at that grey mass above you, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re in November. But no, it’s July.

We should be basking in balmy sunshine, not wrestling with temperamental umbrellas. The streets should be swarming with people in shorts, flip-flops and sunglasses. But no. We’re stuck with miserable indecisive weather that goes from blue skies to grey so fast you might get whiplash.

What’s worse than the miserable weather though? The consistently boring way weather folk talk about it. Take a look at any weather forecast and you’ll see ‘drizzle’, ‘showers’ and ‘rain’. Sometimes you get an adjective before it, like ‘heavy’, ‘scattered’ or ‘persistent’. But that’s as far as it goes.

(Okay, okay, I’ll admit that ‘scattered’ is a nice image, but it’s so overused.)

If Eskimos have 50 words for snow, surely us English speakers can do better than those six words?

I want to know if there’ll be a ‘light tickle of raindrops’ or if it’ll be ‘raining cats and dogs’. Will it be ‘lashing it down’, or a mere ‘sprinkling’? Is it dry-to-sopping-in-half-a-minute, or slightly-slippery-sidewalk kind of weather?

Come on guys. We’ve got no sunshine to frolic in, at least make the miserable weather sound a bit more fun – please?