It’s not exactly encouraging – when you’ve got a number of politicians of various stripes lined up for a cycle tour of Bigtown on Friday – to be driving down the M74 motorway the day before and see the dot matrix signs all warning of ‘heavy rain’ on Friday. Given that this was in the west of Scotland, where heavy rain is more or less the default setting, the sort of rain that they felt was worth warning people about was likely to be very heavy indeed. As in send gopherwood heavy.
Anyway, yesterday morning, going to check the Met Office forecast I remembered that they’d managed to bollocks up their previously perfectly functional* website and replace the simple five day forcast table with some sort of flash-based, doesn’t-work-on-rural-broadband, great-if-you-like-clicking-a-million-times abomination (It’s slightly by the by, but setting aside the fact that sometimes it doesn’t work at all, I can’t be the only one who goes to the Met Office site to answer questions like ‘what day next week won’t be raining so I can arrange to meet someone in town on my bike?’ or ‘is it likely to be frosty in the next few days or should I plant out those potatoes’? So having a ‘five day’ forecast which only shows you one day at a time is not just a misnomer but verging on the bloody useless, is it not? Or is that just me?). So I decided instead to go and have a look at MetCheck instead, only to be confronted with this:
Looks like it’s a good thing I got that jacket after all.
As it happened – and despite there being snow between us and Notso Bigtown – the weather for the event itself was extremely pleasant, culminating in a perfect spring evening and a glorious sunset for my ride home. This may just be the calm before the storm, though, especially given how many people told me hell would freeze over before I got a Bigtown Councillor on a bike. As it was, we got eight of them … that’s got to cause a disturbance in the fabric of the universe.
*I mean, apart from the forecasts themselves, of course
Posted by disgruntled 
