THE ENGLISH AND THE WEATHER

The weather in England explains much about the English. The umbrella is carried even if it does not rain, for good luck with the weather. The well-dressed man-about-town in England always carries his umbrella tightly rolled. If it rains he takes a taxi in which he finds his refuge¹, with his umbrella still tightly rolled. To many English people the word "weather" means "good weather". Seaside landladies say, during a season of rain: "Not having much weather, are we?"

The weather in England, wet, dry, hot, cold, tropical or arctic, is the conversational topic for all classes of English society. The weather has given a start for many of the largest English manufacturing business. Apart from umbrellas, there is an increasing demand for burberries, plastic coverings, gumboots etc.

The uncertainty of the weather has made the English patient, enduring and wary. Because of its geographical position in a deep river valley London is occasionally enveloped by unusually thick fog. The worst of these fogs began on the 4th of December, 1952 and there was a similar one in December, 1962. The streets near the centre of London were jammed with buses crawling along at two miles per hour. People who usually travelled by road decided to take the underground. People caught in the fog literally felt their way with one hand along the walls of buildings, holding the other out before them to avoid colliding with other people.

At Covent Garden Theatre a performance of La Traviata had to be abandoned after the first act because so much fog had penetrated into the building that the audience could no longer see the singers clearly. It was a terrible fog that caused the death of some 4,000 people in London.

As a matter of fact, this "deadly" kind of fog is called by Londoners "smog". It is the kind of fog you get only in towns — particularly in the industrial areas. It is a mixture of smoke and fog together, and it is dangerous and deadly espe­cially for people who are suffering from any kind of respiratory troubles. In the big towns and cities you get very much smoke, it is more concentrated because it doesn't come from household chimneys only, but from all the factories too. Even ordinary fog is pretty nasty.

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Millions of people tune into the weather forecast each evening on television. Most of them imagine that the presenter does little more than arriving at the studio a few minutes before the broadcast, reading the weather, and then going home.

In fact, this image is far from the truth. The two-minute bulletin which we all rely on when we need to know tomorrow's weather is the result of a hard day's work by the presenter, who is actually a highly-qualified meteorologist.

Every morning after arriving at the TV studios, the first task of the day is to collect the latest data from the National Meteorological Office. This office provides up-to-the- minute information about weather conditions throughout the day, both in Britain and around the world. The information is very detailed and includes predictions, satellite and radar pictures, as well as more technical data. After gathering all the relevant material from this office, the forecaster has to translate the scientific terminology and maps into images and words which viewers can easily understand.

The final broadcast is then carefully planned. It is prepared in the same way as other programmes. The presenter decides what to say and in what order to say it. Next a "story board" is drawn up which lays out the script word for word. What makes a weather forecast more complicated than other programmes are the maps and electronic images which are required. The computer has to be programmed so that the pictures appear in the correct order during the bulletin.

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For thousands of years comets have been a mystery to a man. They travel across the sky very fast and have a bright 'tail' of burning gas. The comet Tempel 1 has an orbit far outside the orbit of the furthest planet in our solar system, Pluto. It has been there for 4.6 billion years, 133 million kilometres from Earth. Last week a little American spacecraft crashed into Tempel 1. The spacecraft had a camera and it took a photograph of the comet every minute before it finally crashed into its surface.

The space mission to Tempel 1 cost $335 million and was called Deep Impact. The spacecraft was travelling at 37,000 kilometres per hour when it hit the comet and the crash completely destroyed the spacecraft. But before it hit the comet, the spacecraft took some amazing photographs. The last one was a close-up picture which the spacecraft took just 3 seconds before it crashed into the comet.

"Right now we have lost one spacecraft," said a delighted NASA engineer. Deep Impact was like an American Independence Day fireworks display. It took many years to plan and ended in an enormous explosion.

Comets like Halley's Comet which visit the Earth frequently are not so interesting for scientists. But comets like Tempel are so distant that they could hold the secrets of the planets, the Earth's oceans and even of the original organic chemistry from which life developed. "If you are thinking of comets as possible sources of organic material, then you are looking for the organic elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen," said John Zarnecki of the Open University.

Taken from "NASA Gladly Loses a Spacecraft" by Tim Radford, The Guardian Weekly, 2005.

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MY MEALS ON WHEELS

Looking back on things now, perhaps my being a 'van-vendor' or a mobile canteen owner was meant to be.I've pretty much always been on the road. My father's work involved moving around a lot, so by the time I was fifteen, I had been to six different schools! When I was at college studying Hospitality, I began to work part-time for a programme called 'Meals On Wheels'.

I was a volunteer who drove a van stocked with prepared food. I handed out the food to various elderly or ill people who couldn't prepare meals for themselves. The meals were really good. All well prepared, with hygiene and nutrition taking priority, and people even had choices of vegetarian, diabetic or particular types of ethnic cuisine.

I had to stop working there when I got a full-time job for a catering business. I learnt many tricks of the food trade there as well, but my goal was to become my own boss. I didn't have enough money to open up a restaurant though, and I was still young and unsure of exactly what I wanted to do.

A trip to Japan was the inspiration for my current mobile food business. I loved trying the variety of foods at the 'yatai' or street stalls. One of the owners told me that 'yatai' actually means 'a cart with a roof', and I even saw some of these traditional food pushcarts being towed around. What I also saw were the modern equivalents, large vans that had been converted into mobile kitchens with a large serving window in their side. Customers would line up by the dozens to buy their range of offerings.

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