My girlfriend just told me, with no slim justification, that I should shut up already about the weather. Ever-resembling the sulky school child, I have swallowed the rage, and will now blog about it. Having trouble keeping the younglings under control mum? Get them a blog!
I promise not to labour tedious comparisons or make banal observations, right after this one: the weather at present is shite. With the death of daylight saving, winter seems to have found its cue. The days now end at four, but rarely even begin: for the grey cabinet has no edges when you're stuck inside it. You search the sky's zones for a bit of strong sun, the kind that would, in Sydney, take 0.1 seconds to score a few letters on your retina: 'Sun waz 'ere, 08'. But all you get is drizzle; light, middling, freckly drizzle. Snoop-Dog, the sonic effects you pioneered with your 'drizzle''s are beyond reproach. But did the pathetic image of the sun-starved lad occur to you mid-composition? No, only the Californian climate could give rise to such happy-go-lucky word play. I'm loath to call you a faker, but you really don't know shit about the drizzle.
All this talk about weather has made me think about why there is...all this talk about weather. That is, why 'weather' ever became the paradigmatic 'lowest common denominator' topic. Surely there are better opening remarks available on the conversational market. Weather is immediate and universal, sure. But so are many things: buildings, cars, food, sex, clothes, the Simpsons. Or so I thought.
When I really racked my brain for alternatives, however, I couldn't come up with anything that even nearly approached current climatic patterns as a topic of absolute, blanket relevance. Four years ago now, almost to the day (sorry, temporal specificity is a price I'm having to pay more and more for writing an essay on (that is, concerning, but hopefully the other sense will apply as well) time), I was staying in Northern Italy with some family friends who couldn't speak a word of English. This was good for my Italian, which reached a novice level of competence during this period - but it was also incredibly frustrating. I can't stand cultural and linguistic barriers. They make me highly uneasy and embarrassed. It's one thing to travel independently in a country where you have little to none of the language, hopping along the tourist infrastructure (hostels, common tourist attractions etc). Commercial imperatives made this kind of thing easy a long time ago. But it's a whole different game to take part in a domestic environment. The potential for mix-up and miscommunication increases exponentially. Not only are you a burden on someone else's resources, but you're a burden on their mind: every communicative transaction is a strain. Politeness dictated that I really should have learned Italian.
Where has the weather gone? Well, it was with me then. The universality of weather-talk was institutionalised so deeply that it even filtered into the very early lessons of my thumbed pocket-book, 'Teach Yourself Italian'. A few pages in appeared the deceptively neutral phrase 'fa freddo' (it's cold), along with useful permutations ('fa molto freddo' - it's very cold). It was indeed cold at this time, coming swiftly up to high winter; so the phrase was at least accurate at base level. But it was so much more than this. For me and my equally Anglophone friend, it was the greatest linguistic blessing this side of Latin. I'd never realised before that week in just how many ways 'it's cold' could be deployed. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, conversation would gently pivot around the temperature. It was fun because you knew the domain: a familiar island within a vast, confusing sea. Iteration is always comforting, but no less in a foreign country, where the range of iterable things is severely reduced: 'Oh, we're doing the "it's cold" thing again are we? Brilliant, that I can do!' If adventurous, you could even stick a negative in there: 'it's not cold'. Woah, slow down there Jimmy.
One of the great things about the weather is that it's a never-ending story that can be tapped into at will: by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Constant changes beg for constantly updated comments. 'It's good, it's bad, it's hot, it's cold, it's dry, it's wet, it's typical, it's strange' - the pleasure we get from the behaviour of weather over time, repeatedly meeting and defeating our expectations, is almost analagous to the pleasure of narrative. Weather can do funny (the funniest) things, and the fact that it can still surprise us, after all these years of humanity, and more years of atmosphere, I find inexplicably marvellous. When all is said and done, when books written, films made, files created are finally erased from this fragile planet, the weather - nature's wonder-text - will still be there to entertain. And maybe, in some form, we'll still be there to talk about it.
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1 comment:
Tom, you forget that learning the basics of weather-discussion also furnish you with the tools for bedding the locals:
'It's good, it's bad, it's hot, it's cold, it's dry, it's wet, it's typical, it's strange'
Such basic statements in the Weather section of a travel guide would have it burned as smut if listed under the 'picking up' section.
More importantly, stop complaining about the weather here (which is indeed shite), otherwise they'll confuse you for a local.
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