was John Kettley, and together they were immortalized in a 1988 novelty hit by A Tribe of Toffs from Sunderland, ‘John Kettley is a Weatherman’:
John Kettley is a weatherman
a weatherman
a weatherman
John Kettley is a weatherman
And so is Michael Fish
‘People still talk about Michael Fish,’ Lucy marvels, ‘even people who weren’t born till after the storm.’ It’s one of my first observations about our obsession with the weather that weather forecasters can become national treasures. Lucy trained under the eye of another great weatherman, Francis Wilson. Amongst Francis’ many accolades is he was the first to use computer-generated graphics on British television.
‘Have a go on the weather map,’ Lucy says. ‘Use the map, but engage with the audience,’ she explains as I stand in front of the invisible map ‘hidden’ in the green screen. I glance at the monitor and there, in full Technicolor glory, is my face and arms, gesticulating to the map.
‘We are one of the few live TV broadcasts not to use autocue,’ she says with pride.
Behind me on the television monitor is a map of Britain with moving weather arrows to show the direction of wind, and large green patches to show the rain and showers. More easily identifiable are the yellow and orange circles showing the temperature – the deeper the orange, the hotter the forecast temperature.
‘It will begin cool in the south before getting warmer.’ My attempt at presenting makes me feel slightly fraudulent. And then I remember that ITV Weather alone has 15 million viewers a week and realize the responsibility of the job.
The problem with Britain is that most of the big weather is in the north, while the majority of the dense populations are in the south. The result for a weather presenter can be arms waving wildly high and low on the map, like some Karate Kid impersonation. ‘Francis always told me not to look like I was dancing or chopping with my arms,’ Lucy explains.
‘People love to grumble about the weather,’ she smiles, ‘too hot, too cold, too windy. I suppose it plays up to our national stereotype of a nation of grumblers.’ Interestingly, she attributes the vast number of weather apps now available to our eternal search for ‘the right weather’: if people don’t like a weather prediction, they will look for one that suits them. Trying to tame the untameable weather.
Lucy explains that there are several features that make the English weather what it is, changeable and famously unpredictable. As part of the United Kingdom, England lies between latitudes 50 and 56 degrees north. An island country, it sits on the western seaboard of the continent of Europe, surrounded by sea. The English live at a point where competing air masses meet, creating atmospheric instability and unsettled weather. In The Teatime Islands, my first book, I described England/Britain from the perspective of a faraway outpost as ‘this small rainy island in Western Europe’.
On the other side of the country, our geographical position on the edge of the Atlantic places us at the end of a storm track, a relatively narrow area of ocean down which storms travel, driven by the prevailing winds. As the warm and cold air fly towards and over each other, the earth’s rotation creates cyclones and the UK bears the tail end of them.
What makes our climate so mild is the Gulf Stream, which raises the temperature in the UK by up to 5°C in winter. It also adds moisture to the atmosphere, which makes it much harder to predict the weather as it adds to the number of variables that need to be forecast.
These variables mean vastly unpredictable weather. I can remember both snow at Easter and also such heat that the chocolate eggs were melting. November can be hotter than June, and winter often doesn’t arrive until February. We are more likely to have snow at Easter than Christmas. We can wear T-shirts in November. It’s all topsy-turvy, and that is what we love to talk about. Even within England, some regions are more susceptible than others to certain kinds of weather as the air masses jostle for dominance. North-west England is buffeted by the maritime polar air mass, which can bring frequent showers at any time of the year. North-east England is more exposed to the continental polar air mass, which brings cold dry air. The south and south-east are closest to the continental tropical air mass, which carries warm dry air. The south-west is the area most exposed to the maritime tropical air mass, which ushers in warm moist air. Wet, dry, warm, cold, it is a proper maelstrom. ‘There’s a lot of weather about today,’ meteorological sages like to say mysteriously, as if the skies are full of gods of the elements whimsically calling the shots with thunderbolts and winds, lightning and storms. No wonder so many folk sayings ‘reading the weather’ remain popular. ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning’ first appears in the Bible in the Gospel of Matthew but has led to variations such as ‘Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning’. ‘Rain before seven, fine by eleven’ is another which emphasizes the variability of the weather systems passing over our green and pleasant land.
Lucy has presented hundreds if not thousands of weather reports over a decade. ‘The thing about being a weather girl is that the weather always leads,’ she smiles. ‘We are merely the messengers, we can’t change the weather.’
While it’s fair to say I will probably never become a weatherman, at least Lucy has a warm studio in which she can shelter from the worst of the elements, which is a lot more than can be said for what is arguably England’s most extreme forecasting job, that of the Fell Top Assessor. This was the next port of call in my English weather odyssey.
A bitter wind ripped across the car park as I made my way to the waiting Land Rover. It was midwinter and I was joining a man with one of the most unusual weather jobs in England.
I have always loved the Lake District. I will never forget the first time we went there as a family. I couldn’t believe that England had such a magical, watery landscape. I still get that childhood excitement whenever I visit as I hurtle back to my childhood. It is the location of Swallows and Amazons.
But today I was in the Helvellyn range of mountains, between Thirlmere and Ullswater, ready to climb Helvellyn itself. It is a dramatic, rugged mountain – at 3,117ft the third-highest point in England – and from its summit, on a clear day, you can see Scotland and Wales. Alfred Wainwright, the celebrated fell walker and guide book author, described one ridge to Helvellyn Plateau as ‘all bare rock, a succession of jagged fangs ending in a black tower’, which makes the fact that there have been a number of fatalities on the mountain over the years understandable.
The rocks of Helvellyn were forged in the heat of an ancient volcano some 450 million years ago. It inspires poetry as well as respect for its dangers. Coleridge and Wordsworth both wrote about it. This is the final stanza of Wordsworth’s poem ‘To ——, on Her First Ascent to the Summit of Helvellyn’:
For the power of hills is on thee,
As was witnessed through thine eye
Then, when old Helvellyn won thee
To confess their majesty!
The mountain has attracted lots of odd adventurers. In 1926, one man landed and took off from the summit in a small plane. Today, though, Helvellyn is arguably best known for one of the strangest weather-forecasting jobs in the world: that of the Fell Top Assessor, whose role is to assess both meteorological and ground conditions to provide an accurate local forecast for the estimated 15 million visitors to the Lake District National Park each year.
