The year 2024 barely started when we were battered by storm after storm – and according to those highly paid and sometimes highly irritating weather forecasters, in-between the storms, we’ve had heavy rain and wind.
Err . . . excuse me: isn’t a storm basically a meteorological mixture of heavy rain and wind?
Perhaps telling us Storm Bonnie will follow Storm Shaky is tedious, so they break the monotony by suggesting something else is causing us to get wet. And cold. And miserable.
The storms around my way worried me, because I’ve got a new garden shed – and it wasn’t cheap!
Well, okay it was. But that’s not the point. I was concerned it might be damaged by the elements.
The morning after one powerful storm, in which the winds whipped up to 80 miles an hour, I looked out of my back bedroom window in trepidation (which is a small suburb of Ammanford) to check on my shed. Fortunately, it was still in one piece. Unfortunately, it was in Birmingham.
Now, I make no apology for re-cycling that joke from a year or so ago as it’s a favourite and I’ll probably drag it out of semi-retirement one more time before I send it off to the old jokes home.
At this point, let me make it clear I’m not a conspiracy theorist.
Though, oddly, I do have a theory about conspiracy theorists that until now I’ve only shared with a few like-minded people.
Which, on reflection, does suggest I’m a conspiracy theorist. Hmm…
Okay. My theory is… storms have become more frequent, more powerful and more destructive since some ‘Genius’ decided to give them names.
Until a year or so ago, weather forecasters just warned us that ‘a storm’ was on its way. It arrived, it went and there was always a long respite before the next one.
Since they’ve been given names, the publicity has gone to their heads, so now they rapidly follow one after another, each of them desperate to be the next scary storm to have their name splashed all over the media.
It’s only a theory.
But it’s got you thinking, hasn’t it?