Weather

 

Weather, it was once explained to me after I asked a bureau employee what is weather, can be defined as rain. Either it is raining, or not raining. This would seem to make weather reports redundant, fairly much, yet weather insists on cropping up in most news conversations. I remember Rosemary Margan. She stood behind a Perspex screen with a map of Victoria decorated in wavy high and low fronts, herself drawing extra arrows meaningfully with a squeaky texta in the direction of Melbourne. She lived in a time when females were weathergirls and males were weathermen. One of the men was Rob Gell, a man who took weather with the full gravity it deserves, whether raining or not raining. Rob fearlessly talked isobars and continental troughs, his evening reports being in the nature of mathematical theorems, which they are once you think about it. Another man seemed not to take high pressure areas with the same earnestness. Edwin Maher cultivated the art of the pointer, an essential prop for homing in on a weather map. At first instead of a stick he introduced a carrot, then an ice-cream cone, till the novelty turned into a cult, with viewers sending in pointy objects of varying suggestiveness to promote their charity or special day. Nevertheless, today as well as taking us direct to the weather bureau, the internet provides much more in-depth, accurate weather than TV weatherpersons can squeeze into a minute. They are a thing of the past for someone who hasn’t watched television news for twenty years, but this week work colleagues disclosed that they are followers of Jane Bunn. Jane Bunn, apparently, has vocabulary. Her viewers can expect more than thunderstorms, they can expect “a rumble of thunder”. A cloudy day will include promisingly “fluffy clouds”. Alternately, there could be “drizzly showers.” This adjectival injection to Jane’s reports keeps her fans on edge, but divides those who like their weather more Gell-like. Forecasters walk the line of making the unpredictable sound predictable, and still getting it wrong; the line between doing something new and original with a script of mundane routine. Even Jane Bunn knows there is a limit to the ways she can say it’s going to rain tomorrow, but for now my work colleagues and I enjoy collecting her bon mots. “A little spit of rain.” “A few spots of drizzle.” “Small hail.” “Storms will be barrelling through.” I have also learnt that she collects rainbows, photographs of rainbows at least, from her many followers. These and other facsimiles of weather are posted on her Facebook page; all she has to do is include the latest choice during the evening broadcast. This kind of information revolution would have been impossible back in the days of transparent maps and sceptred pointers.