The Wonders of Official Advice.

The pendulum has swung dramatically. This time last week the temperature in central England was 50F. These past two days have been very warm, and tomorrow we’re forecast to hit 80F. It takes me back to this time last year, when the British Met Office put out a long range weather forecast saying that we were likely to have very hot, dry summer. Not only did the media engage in its customary habit of sensationalising the unknowable, but the government got into the act as well.

 

Some previously unheard of advisory body sprang up and told us how we should handle the dangers of the impending heatwave. They offered three bits of invaluable advice:

 

 ‘Before the heatwave starts, ascertain which is the coolest room in your house so you’ll know where to retire to when it gets hot.’ Let’s face it, anybody who doesn’t already know which is the coolest room in their house would be unlikely to survive getting out of bed too quickly, let alone a serious heatwave.

 

‘Make sure you have a fair weather friend, somebody you can call on if you get into difficulty.’ Do I need to point out that they can’t even get the terminology right, because a ‘fair weather friend’ is the opposite of what you need? It’s somebody who only wants to know you when everything is hunky dory, and runs the other way when you’re in trouble. 

 

But then there’s the question of how we were supposed to go about getting this friend, assuming we don’t already have one. Put an advert in the local paper? Best of all: ‘Paint the outside of your house white.’ Oh, right. I’m laughing too hard to comment on that one. Except to stutter that there must be around 30 million dwellings in Britain. That’s a lot of paint, a lot of money, a lot of time, and one hell of a lot of pointless bullshit from those whose job it is to run the country. And to top it all, last summer was on the cool side with a fair amount of rain.