When someone uses an acronym they want you to ask what they mean so they can park an incredulous look on their face: ‘What, you don’t know?’ Then they will look clever when they have to explain.
A word of warning, though. Don’t try this on television or you will hear the presenter ask the cameraman to fit the strawberry filter. This is a device reserved for crashing bores who’ve driven a long way to appear on the box and who don’t want to be told that they’re not interesting enough. It means: ‘Set the camera up. But don’t bother turning it on.’
Sunday 13 July 2003
Red Sky at Night, Michael Fish’s Satellite is On Fire
I rang the Meteorological Office last week and asked something which in the whole 149 years of the service it has never been asked before. ‘How come,’ I began, ‘your weather forecasts are so accurate these days?’
Sure, there have been complaints from the tourist industry in recent months that the weathermen ‘sex up’ bulletins, skipping over the sunny skies anticipated in England, Scotland and Wales and concentrating instead on some weather of mass destruction that they are juicily expecting to find on Rockall.
That’s as maybe, but the fact is this: weather reports in the past were rubbish, works of fiction that may as well have been written by Alistair MacLean. And now they aren’t.
We were told that the heatwave would end last Tuesday, and it did. We were told that Wednesday would be muggy and thundery as hell, and it was. When I woke up on Thursday, without opening the curtains I knew to put on a thick shirt because they had been saying for days that it would be wet, cold and windy.
It is not just 24-hour predictions, either. Now you are told with alarming accuracy what the weather will be like in two or even three days’ time. So how are the bods in the Met Office’s new Exeter headquarters doing this?
The man who answered the telephone seemed a bit surprised by the pleasantness of my question. But once he had climbed back into his chair and removed the tone of incredulity from his voice, he began a long and complicated explanation about modern weather forecasting.
At least I think it was about weather forecasting. It was so difficult to follow that, if I am honest, it could have been his mother’s recipe for baked Alaska.
In a nutshell, it seems that they get hourly reports from meteorological observation points all over the world. These are then added to the findings from a low-orbit satellite that cruises round the world every 107 minutes, at a height of 800 miles, measuring wave heights.
Other satellites looking at conditions in the troposphere and the stratosphere chip in with their data and then you add sugar, lemon and milk and feed the whole caboodle into a Cray supercomputer that is capable of making about eleventy billion calculations a second.
This system, soon to be updated with an even cleverer computer, has been operational since the middle of the 1990s, which does beg a big question: what was the point of weather forecasting before it came along? Everyone was jolly cross with Michael Fish when he didn’t see the 1987 storm coming. But it turns out that he had no satellites and no computers, just a big checked jacket.
Big checked jackets are no good at predicting the weather. Nor, it seems, are those mud ’n’ cider bods who tramp around Somerset with big earlobes and a forked twig. Back in the spring a gnarled old Cotswold type told me that because of the shape of the flies and the curl of the cow pats we were in for a lousy July. My gleaming red nose testifies to the fact that he was wrong.
Then you have people who say you can tell when rain is coming because the cows are lying down. Not so. According to my new friend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.
There are some pointers. Swallows fly differently when there is thunder about, and high clouds have tails pointing to the north-west when you are about to get wet.
Furthermore, red sky at night signifies that hot, dusty air is coming while red sky in the morning shows it has gone away.
However, using the natural world as a pointer is mainly useless because it is good for showing only what weather there is now, which you know, or what is coming in a minute. Pine cones, crows and especially otters do not know what pressure systems are prevalent in the Atlantic, or where they are going.
Then I said to the man from the Met, what if a low-pressure area suddenly veers north for no reason? The computer must occasionally get it wrong. It does, apparently, but there are six senior weather forecasters at the Met Office who decide whether to believe it or not.
Now that has to be one of the ballsiest jobs in Britain today. The most powerful computer is telling you that two and two is five. And you have to say, ‘No, it isn’t.’
There is, however, a worrying downside to the accuracy levels of this man and machine combo.
The British are known throughout the world for moaning about the weather. It is one of our defining national characteristics. It is not the variety we hate, though. That is a good thing. It’s the unpredictability. When you turn up at royal Ascot in a pair of wellingtons and the sun shines all day, it is annoying. And it is the same story if your summer dress gets all soaked and see-through at Henley.
What happens if the unpredictability is removed from the equation? If you know what the weather will be like on Tuesday you’ll be able to organise a barbecue knowing that the sun will be out. Then what will you talk about?
Inadvertently, those computer geeks are unpicking the very fabric of everything that makes us British.
Sunday 20 July 2003
I Wish I’d Chosen Marijuana and Biscuits Over Real Life
Right. You’ve got to take me seriously this morning because I am no longera jumped-up motoring journalist with a head full of rubbish. I am now a doctor. I have a certificate.
Yes, Brunel University has given me an honorary degree, or an honoris causa, as we scholars like to call it. So now I am a doctor. I can mend your leg and give you a new nose. I am qualified to see your wife naked and design your next fridge freezer.I think I might even have some letters after my name.
Sadly, they don’t send doctorates through the post. So last Monday I had to go to the historic Wembley Conference Centre near the North Circular where they gave me a robe and floppy hat that made me look like a homosexual.
The whole event was designed to run like clockwork. I had been told weeks beforehand about every last detail, including how many steps there were between the entrance and the stage.
I knew why of course. I’d be entering as a normal man, a thicky, and I had to be told there were 21 steps or I might stop halfway, thinking I’d made it.
On the way out, as a fully fledged doctorof everything, there were no instructions at all. It just said ‘procession out’.
In between, a man in a robe read out half a million names, most of which seem to have been a collection of letters plucked from a Scrabble bag, and the students filed past the chancellor, an endless succession of beaming brown and yellow faces, collected their degrees and set off into the world.
I was deeply, properly, neck-reddeningly jealous. Dammit, I thought, sitting there in my Joseph coat and my Elton hat. Why didn’t I do this?
You should never regret any experience, but my God, it is possible to regret missing out on one. And that’s what I did, 25 years ago when I decided there were better things to do at school than read Milton.
I used his books as bog rolls and as a result lost my shot at paradise: university.
Yes, things have worked out pretty well since – they even gave me an honorary degree for dangling around under Brunel’s suspension bridge. Yet there is a chink in the smoothness of it all. Well, more of a chip really, on my shoulder.
I am sure a university education wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to my professional life. From what I can gather, students spend their three years after school either on an island off Australia pretending to study giant clams, or being pushed down the high street in a bed. Or drunk.
Certainly I learnt more in my three yea
rs on the Rotherham Advertiser than some of those students who were at Wembley on Monday.
One, I noted, had studied the ramifications of having sex in prison while another had spent her time looking at the correlation between life in Bhutan and life in Southall.
But I’m no fool. Not now anyway. And I know that even the silliest university course is more fun than putting on a tie every morning and working for a living.
When I was nineteen, I was trawling the suburbs of Rotherham for stories, listening to fat women telling me their kiddies’ heads were full of insect eggs and that the council should be doing something about it.
Oh sure, I was paid £17 a week, which covered my petrol and ties. But I was acutely aware that half of my earnings was being taken away and given to students who were spending it on marijuana and biscuits. While you were settling down for an evening’s arguing at the debating society, I was poring overmy SouthYorkshire/ English translation book, desperately trying to work out what Councillor Ducker was on about.
While you were being bollocked for missing your eighteenth lecture in a row, I was being hauled over the coals for misreading my shorthand notes and as a result getting my report of the inquest disastrously wrong. And all you had to do to set things right was sleep with your tutor. I could not solve my problem by sleeping with the libel judge.
When you’ve been educated by the university of life you arrive at the top completely worn out.
Real university, on the other hand, gives you a leg up so everything is less exhausting.
Then there is the question of friends. I know people who went to university with Stephen Fry and Richard Curtis and Boris Johnson. Let’s not forget that Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman were at Cambridge together, and what must a night out with that lot have been like? More fun, I should imagine, than a night out with the friends you made while stocking shelves at Safeway.
Let me try to intellectualise it for you. At the beginning of the ceremony in Wembley the Vice-Chancellor of Brunel addressed the audience saying that there are 50 institutions in Europe that go back more than a thousand years.
There’s the Catholic Church, the parliaments of Britain, Iceland and the Isle of Man and a few quasi-governmental organisations in Italy.
All the rest are universities. They work. And I missed out. And to my dying day I shall regret it.
Sunday 27 July 2003
I’ve been to Paradise… It was an Absolute Pain
‘No.’ That’s what I said when the producers of a programme about the jet engine asked if I’d like to fly round the world in five days.
‘Yes.’ That’s what I said when they pointed out that we’d be breaking the journey with a day on the beach in somewhere called Moorea, which is a small tropical island five minutes from Tahiti.
On paper, French Polynesia sounds like one of the most exotic idylls anywhere on earth, a collection of 120 or so islands dotted over an area of the south Pacific that’s the same size as Europe. In reality, it takes 24 hours to get there and it’s not worth the bother.
At the airport everyone from the customs man to the bus driver gave me a necklace of flowers, so that by the time I arrived at the hotel and conference centre I looked like a human garden centre and had a spine the shape of an oxbow lake.
Here, after they’d given me another necklace or two, they wanted to know about breakfast: not what I wanted, but whether I’d like it delivered to my room in a canoe.
And therein lies the heart of the problem with all these pointy lumps of volcanic residue that were pretty much a secret until the jet engine came along. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Mauritius or the Maldives, Tahiti or the Seychelles. They are all the same: completely overdone.
All of them are advertised in the brochures with a picture of what I swear is the same palm tree. You must have seen it: the horizontal one, wafting its fronds gently over the turquoise waters and white sand of pretty well everywhere.
Then there are the hotels, with their increasingly idiotic ways of giving you a taste of life on a tropical island.
This means sharing your bath with half a hundredweight of petals and finding your bog roll folded into the shape of a rose every morning and having a monogrammed Hobie Cat moored to your own manservant. Is that what it was like for Robinson Crusoe? How do you know? Because when you’re there, one thing’s for sure, you won’t set foot outside the hotel grounds.
To complete the picture, the staff are dolled up in a ludicrous facsimile of what once, perhaps, might have been the national dress. Even the blokes in Tahiti had to wear skirts, and to complete their humiliation they had to walk up and down the superheated sand all day in bare feet.
Unless of course they were trying to deliver a mountain of bacon and eggs, in a canoe, on a choppy sea, without letting it blow away or go cold or fall into the water.
Small wonder they behaved like everything was too much trouble. Give the poor bastards some shoes, for crying out loud. And some strides.
Did I mention the dolphin? As a unique selling point the boys in Tahiti had caught themselves a big grey beasty which spent all day on its back, in a lagoon, being pawed by overweight American women with preposterous plastic tits and unwise G-string bikini bottoms. ‘Would you like to see his penis?’ asked the man in a skirt when I climbed into the water.
No. What I’d like to do is spear you through the heart with a harpoon and let the miserable thing have a taste of freedom. But instead I tickled its belly and whispered into its ear: ‘Call that a penis, acorn crotch.’
Thinking that this sort of thing is giving you a taste of life on a tropical island is as silly as thinking you can get a taste of beef from licking a cow. On a real tropical island, like Tom Hanks in Castaway, you have to smash your own teeth out with ice skates and talk to footballs, and there are insects, huge articulated things with the head and upper torso of a hornet and the rear end of a wolf.
I stayed at one hotel, can’t remember where, where they made the locals trample about in the flower beds all day with Volkswagen Beetle engines on their backs spraying the bushes with insecticide.
Occasionally one of the poor chaps would gas himself to death, or catch his skirt in the machinery, and have to be carted off. But soon there’d be another in his place. And for what purpose? To sanitise paradise? It didn’t work. So far as I could see, the spray seemed to make the insects a little bit bigger.
Don’t be fooled by the sun either. It may look nice in the pictures, dipping its feet into the sea after a hard day warming the solar system, but in reality it’ll cause you to sit in the shade all day until you look like a stick of forced rhubarb. And it’ll melt the glue in the spine of your book, allowing the last ten pages to blow away just before you get there.
There’s no respite at night either. You won’t be able to sleep with the air con on, it’ll be too noisy. And you won’t be able to sleep with it off because then all you’ll hear is the squeals of the honeymoon couple in the authentic bungalow next door.
Only once have I been to a tropical beach that was completely unmolested. It was in Vietnam and it was perfect. Except that after twenty minutes or so I wanted a girl in a skimpy ao dai to bring me a cold Coke.
And there’s the thing. We dream the tropical dream. But we’re built to live in Dewsbury.
Sunday 31 August 2003
Eureka, I’ve Discovered a Cure for Science
A report in the paper last week said that the world is running out of scientists as pupils opt for ‘easy’ subjects like media studies rather than difficult ones like the effect of fluorocarbons on methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosyl glutamylserylleucylphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyl lysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamylglycylalanylphenyl anylvalylprolylphenylalanylvalylthreonylleucylglycy laspartylprolylglycylisoleucylutamylglutaminylserylleu cyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucyl…
Sadly, I shall have to call a halt to the actual name of this natty little protein at this point because I’m paid by the word. A
nd I don’t want to get to the end of the column having written only one. It illustrates the point neatly, though. Which would you rather do? Hang around in Soho, drinking skinny lattes with Graham Norton, or emigrate to somewhere like Durham and spend your life teaching hydrogen how to speak?
That’s not such a silly idea because underneath the report about a shortage of scientists was another which said that a professor of acoustics at Salford University has proved that, contrary to popular belief, a duck’s quack does echo.
Though only faintly.
Who gives a stuff? Apparently, the professor in question was trying to solve the problem of echoey public address systems in churches and stadiums. But quite what the duck has to do with this, I have no idea. I mean, what’s he going to do? Give the vicar’s job to a mallard?
Elsewhere in the world, other scientists have been monitoring 25 sites in America’s Great Basin. And they’ve found that the pika, a small and useless relative of the rabbit, is not coping as well as might be hoped with global warming. Oh dear.
Here at home, scientists have discovered that children who gorge on fizzy drinks in the morning have the reaction times of a 70-year-old. Only, I should imagine, if the fizzy drink in question is champagne.
Ooh, here’s a good one. Two British teams of medical researchers have generated a human cell. Sounds spooky, so should we be worried? Not really. They say this is the first step to growing replacement livers, but this seems a trifle farfetched since there is no way of telling a cell what to become. You may hope for a liver and end up with an ear. Only God can decide, and thanks to science all his representatives on earth are soon to be replaced with ducks.
I know it must be depressing when Greenpeace rolls around on your important and juicy discoveries, like GM food, but why have you spent so long determining that women who take pain-killers at the time of conception are more likely to miscarry? Even you, in your freezing lab, must realise that conception cannot happen unless something takes the headache away first.
The World According to Clarkson Page 20
