There’s a Storm Coming!

Storm Dylan  was supposed to have given us a hammering last week, though I can’t say I noticed. At
least not in London, where on Wimbledon Common I barely saw a blade of grass move, no trees swaying, and Liz and I were even able to comfortably picnic on one of the benches without our Sainsbury’s sandwich wrappers blowing away. Dylan schmillen.

Now it’s Eleanor’s turn, and parts of Britain have been told to expect 80mph+ winds, high tides, and possibly flooding. We’ll see. The Tightly-Furled Umbrella remains, at least at this point, tightly-furled.

The meteorological service has been naming storms for only the past two to three years, but already we’ve become accustomed to this anthropomorphic attempt at giving them a personality. It’s so much more satisfying when you can rage against a person. Bloody Brian! Cursed Katie, etc., though it doesn’t at all alter the damage a storm can do, or decrease the dangers. It just gives us something to cling to, which, in 80mph winds, isn’t a bad thing.

Having lived in so-called ‘Windy Wellington’, New Zealand’s capital, for many years, Liz and I are well-accustomed to taking a hammering from its two main blusters, the northerly and the southerly. No names for these, they’re just ‘that bloody northerly or southerly’ – the compass point of origin is all you need to know. They’re measured locally on the trampoline scale. A Force 5 Trampoline will see the garden rebounder overturn, while a Force Eight will see it in the neighbour’s garden, upside down. Possibly with the neighbour underneath. Any force higher than that and you send out a search party.

With Wellington’s breezes commonly achieving 60mph-plus, and over 70mph quite regularly, Wellingtonians simply shrug off these zephyrs and heap extra praise on the city on those days when the sun shines and there’s no wind. That’s when you hear the phrase ‘You can’t beat Wellington on a good day’ trotted out, though the words have hardly left your mouth before they’re blown away again.

So Eleanor’s threat of 80mph doesn’t faze us, and certainly not in London, where winds rarely seem to get serious enough to even mention, let alone name. Data from a site called Weather Spark indicates that at this time of the year through to early April, London’s average wind speed is just over 11.5 miles per hour, and that is, officially, in the storm season. It’s hardly strong enough to flap our EU flag.

Anyway, far from battening down the hatches, I’ve been doing some research to find out how storms are named, and it turns out it’s done alphabetically, with a new list created especially for each new storm season. So far this season we’ve had storms Aileen, Brian, Caroline, and Dylan the most recent; Eleanor is next. After that you can look forward (in order – because this is done by the meteorological service)  Fionn, Georgina, Hector, Iona, and James. There’s more, but I’ve run out of puff.

Apparently, when the nomenclature scheme was announced, more than 10,000 names were collected for consideration. Some of these are almost certainly unprintable, some unpronounceable, and others un-PC, so we’ve ended up with ‘safe’ names which have been agreed by both the Met Office in the UK and Ireland's Met Eireann. They’ve also agreed to alternate between genders, though this doesn’t take into account gender fluidity. There’s no Quentin either, because it’s been agreed that storm names won’t be used if they begin with Q, U, X, Y or Z. Apparently there aren’t enough names that begin with those letters, which must piss off the Yussefs, Xaviers, Zeldas and Ursulas. And Quentins.

Not all storms get to be named though – it depends on their forecasted severity and likely impact, so you only get a moniker if you’re a nasty piece of work. But we’re missing a trick here, because some names from history could be ideally linked to raging tempests, and could be chosen for their historical contexts rather than their inoffensive or politically-correct nature.

A weather bomb that was likely to move from England across the North Sea and cause immense damage to Germany for example could be called Winston. An incredible gale sweeping down from Scotland that battered England surely deserves to be named Wallace.

But for a massive cyclonic windstorm that uproots 300 year-old trees, rips roofs off buildings, smashes power lines to the ground and erodes the spirit of the common man, there is only one name: Thatcher. A Thatcher wouldn’t just blow; it would handbag.

Stay safe.

(You can listen to this blog as a podcast here!)