31 January 2005

Scottish weather - Lesson one.

The weather today? Damp. Well actually it's a little more than damp today I would say its verging more towards wet. I should explain the Scottish climate to those poor people among you who are not fortunate enough to live in this place we call Scotland.
The Scottish climate consists basically of two main things. The first of these is water. It is very important to have a good grasp of all things watery if you want to understand Scotland. I'll explain more of this later. The second important thing is Wind. Wind comes in two forms - personal wind otherwise known as farts and climactic wind. In these early posts we will restrict ourselves to considering the climactic kind. Usually in Scotland these two things - wind and water - are found together in combination but they can also happen independently. So as you may guess we can have a number of possible permutations;

1) Water on its own. This comes in a number of forms; Mist, fog, drizzle, shit rain (sorry excuse my spelling that should be sheet rain.)

2)Wind on its own. This also comes in a number of varieties; windy, gale, storm, and hurricane.

3) Windy water. This combination occurs when the water component is more important than the windy component. So the rain may be lashing down , or we may have driving rain. Windy water may also be used as description of the weather on Scottish beaches. (more on this later)

4) Watery wind. This combination occurs when the predominant factor is wind but with some water. This is frequently hard to distinguish from combination 3. Why? because one minute it will be pishing down then a minute later it may be driving rain then still later it may be fucking pouring down.

I should, for the sake of accuracy, point out that there is technically a fifth combination. This combination - no water, no wind - is I understand technically known as sunshine. We have heard rumours of such a climatic condition and indeed I have friends who claim to have experienced this however I am not inclined to believe them. Personally I believe that this is one of those theoretical constructs that sounds good on paper when the equations are worked out but which is never really encountered in real life. However if any reader has encountered this condition in Scotland we would be interested to hear from you.
More later.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is the God's truth. I was born and grew up in Scotland, live in America now. My abiding memory of Scotland is of being cold and wet.