style="font-size:15px;"> If the rain’s got to fall, let it fall on Thursday,
Saturday, Friday, any day but my day.
Sunday’s the day when it’s got to be fine,
’Cause that’s when I’m meeting my girl.
The weather is a fundamental part of who we are. It has been estimated that weather-obsessed British people spend on average six months of their lives talking about whether it’s going to rain or shine, according to a survey published recently. Speculation about whether it’s going to be wet, complaints about the cold and murmurings about the heat are also the first points of conversation with strangers or colleagues for 58 per cent of Britons, the survey recorded. Another study found that Britons talk about the weather for about two days (forty-nine hours, to be exact) every year and the subject comes up more often than work, what is on television, sport or gossip.
Nineteen per cent of over-65s questioned also believe they can predict the weather as well as a professional weatherman. We are a nation whose starting and ending points are the weather.
The more I roamed England, the more I turned the nature of the book over in my head. Then one day, as I walked through the rain along Blackpool beach, I thought to myself, ‘That’s it. This is an honest portrait of my own experiences of Englishness over the years. The weather seeps into every corner of our English personality but the book is actually about understanding Englishness. It’s about Marmite, umbrellas, wonky teeth, sporting innovation and heroic failure. It’s about bad food and royalty and Hugh-Grant type characters. It’s as diverse as the nation itself.’
And what about the divide? Is there really such a thing as one Englishness? We might be a tiny island, but geographically and socially we are arguably one of the most diverse nations in the world. There is the obvious North/South divide, but there are more nuanced differences across the counties that make up England.
Shortly before I handed in my manuscript, my editor emailed me. ‘Do you think you could call it British?’ he asked. My heart sank, but it also gave me the resolve to lift my head and puff out my chest.
I am English (sort of) and I am proud of it, and this is my story of Living Englishly.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.’
John Ruskin
Millbank Studios, opposite the Houses of Parliament, was a hive of political activity as I made my way into the entrance hall.
‘Hello Ben,’ smiled a smart-looking man in full naval ceremonial dress.
‘Hello sir.’
It was Lord West of Spithead, former First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff. During my Royal Naval Reserve days, he was kind of a big deal. He also happens to be the father of my great friend, Will.
‘What are you doing here?’ he enquired. ‘About to climb Everest?’
‘I’m here to be a weather presenter.’ At which point I think I lost his attention and he marched off towards Parliament with a wink.
I was ushered down a narrow corridor, through a high-security door and into a large TV studio, ITV Weather’s dedicated meteorological nerve centre. I had decided that any quest in search of Englishness had to start with a visit to the place we go for our daily weather fix.
‘Hello Ben,’ smiled Lucy Verasamy. ‘Cup of tea?’ she asked (obeying rule one of Englishness).
There was no need for weather small talk here. Lucy is weather. She lives the weather and she loves the weather. ‘What percentage of your life do you spend talking about the weather?’ I asked.
‘About fifty per cent,’ she smiled.
When it comes to dinner-party conversation, Lucy’s job must make her the best guest. All her weather small talk is big talk. She knows everything about it. She positively oozes weather fanaticism, speaking at 100mph. I thought I was good at talking until I met Lucy.
‘Do you want to see the studio?’
I felt like a child in a sweet shop. I’m sure I’m not supposed to be this thrilled by a weather studio, but apparently I’m not alone. ‘People do get pretty excited,’ she admitted as we walked into a large empty room with a huge green piece of fabric hanging from the wall. ‘Same one Harry Potter’s cloak was made from,’ she winked.
She walked onto her presenting mark and immediately an image of her standing in front of a large map of the British Isles appeared on one of the monitors. This is the picture of the professional weather presenter we’re used to seeing.
Given that we can now access the weather from multiple sources, I wondered what the role of a weather presenter is in 2017.
‘You can get weather apps, weather online, weather in social media, in the papers, on the radio,’ she explained, ‘but the weather presenter’s role is to interpret that data and translate it for our viewers.’ A digital weather report can’t predict humidity, hay fever risk and all the other important effects of the conditions on our lives.
‘What’s the most common question?’
‘“Is it going to snow at Christmas?” followed by “Will it be a hot summer?”’
You can’t say we aren’t predictable.
Of course, all weather presenters are now marked by the most notorious weather-presenting ‘moment’ on 15 October 1987, when Michael Fish got the forecast wrong in spectacular style. ‘Earlier today a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Don’t worry. There isn’t,’ he announced cheerily during the weather slot on the One O’Clock News that day. That night, force 11 winds gusted across the south of England for several hours, uprooting 15 million trees and causing total mayhem. Fish’s legendary ‘blooper forecast’ has since had more than half a million hits on YouTube.
In a typically English way, Fish has lived up to the ‘gaffe’ – though he maintains he was talking about a different storm system over the North Atlantic which didn’t reach England, not the depression from the Bay of Biscay that caused the damage. He makes regular appearances on comedy shows, reliving the ‘hurricane blooper’ with self-deprecating humour. Thanks to the bankability of weather as a topic of interest to the English, the controversy has spun its own cultural sideshow. The term ‘the Michael effect’ was coined for the tendency ever since of weather presenters to predict a worst-case scenario in order to avoid being caught out. Fish appeared as guest presenter of the weather news on the twentieth anniversary of the Great Storm. A clip of his original bulletin was immortalized and given global exposure as part of a video montage in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Summer Olympics.
Back in the 1980s and early 90s, weathermen really
