Friday, September 18, 2009
WHATEVER THE WEATHER IN BROWN BRITAIN, IRELAND DOESN'T EXIST
When the BBC's national weather forecast comes on, I sit less comfortably in my chair - for two reasons:
Firstly, I hate, with a passion, the hideous colour now imposed onto the British Isles - a rather drab and dingy shade of brown that makes the country look like some post-apocalyptic desert. Mind you, given the state of the nation under New Labour's Gordon Brown, perhaps the colour is entirely appropriate. We're all in the sh*t, sh*t is brown in colour (usually) and who presided over our immersion in the brown stuff but Mr Brown? Quick joke: Did you hear about the two men who fell into a sewer and drowned? They were interred together.
Anyway, back to the point. I would appreciate it if the map could be more in keeping with the perception of our country as the 'green and pleasant land' of yore, maybe with some relief to show our magnificent hill and mountain terrain, so how about it, BBC? Talking of green and pleasant lands leads me neatly on to my second point.
Just over the water lies the 'emerald isle', a chunk of which, rightly or wrongly (don't want to get into that here) is part of the United Kingdom. The other, larger part, is a country so foreign, so alien, that it doesn't exist at all when it comes to the weather. Yet the citizens of both parts are constantly to-ing and fro-ing between them as if they were one country - as indeed in most ways they are.
Surely it would be in the interests of good neighbourliness with the Republic of Ireland to acknowledge its existence, meteorologically speaking, and include details of what's happening to the weather there? If you live in the North and are planning to drive down to Dublin for the day, you'd probably like to know what the weather's going to be like, wouldn't you? Well, Auntie Beeb won't tell you. Maybe she does on the regional weather for Northern Ireland, but I wouldn't count on it. And I bet national forecasts in the Republic include the North - well, you would, wouldn't you?
We're more closely related to Ireland than any other European country and our uniquely isolated geographical proximity means we're all in the same boat, weatherwise, so why not include all our cousins over the Irish sea in our national forecasts - it would be the grown-up, friendly and neighbourly thing to do, wouldn't it?
When the BBC's national weather forecast comes on, I sit less comfortably in my chair - for two reasons:
Firstly, I hate, with a passion, the hideous colour now imposed onto the British Isles - a rather drab and dingy shade of brown that makes the country look like some post-apocalyptic desert. Mind you, given the state of the nation under New Labour's Gordon Brown, perhaps the colour is entirely appropriate. We're all in the sh*t, sh*t is brown in colour (usually) and who presided over our immersion in the brown stuff but Mr Brown? Quick joke: Did you hear about the two men who fell into a sewer and drowned? They were interred together.
Anyway, back to the point. I would appreciate it if the map could be more in keeping with the perception of our country as the 'green and pleasant land' of yore, maybe with some relief to show our magnificent hill and mountain terrain, so how about it, BBC? Talking of green and pleasant lands leads me neatly on to my second point.
Just over the water lies the 'emerald isle', a chunk of which, rightly or wrongly (don't want to get into that here) is part of the United Kingdom. The other, larger part, is a country so foreign, so alien, that it doesn't exist at all when it comes to the weather. Yet the citizens of both parts are constantly to-ing and fro-ing between them as if they were one country - as indeed in most ways they are.
Surely it would be in the interests of good neighbourliness with the Republic of Ireland to acknowledge its existence, meteorologically speaking, and include details of what's happening to the weather there? If you live in the North and are planning to drive down to Dublin for the day, you'd probably like to know what the weather's going to be like, wouldn't you? Well, Auntie Beeb won't tell you. Maybe she does on the regional weather for Northern Ireland, but I wouldn't count on it. And I bet national forecasts in the Republic include the North - well, you would, wouldn't you?
We're more closely related to Ireland than any other European country and our uniquely isolated geographical proximity means we're all in the same boat, weatherwise, so why not include all our cousins over the Irish sea in our national forecasts - it would be the grown-up, friendly and neighbourly thing to do, wouldn't it?
