‘Wubbo’ has made it on to the list and so has ‘Dave’, but although I’ve tried a hundred times, including my kids’ names, I’ve had absolutely no luck
The UK’s most memorable storm occurred in 1987, almost 30 years before storms got names, and will therefore always be known as “the one that Michael Fish said definitely wouldn’t happen”. It was a devastating weather event if you cared about trees, or you held adult responsibility for a roof. If you were 14 and all the routes to school were blocked, yet the train to the cinema was unaccountably still running, and you went to see Hope and Glory – which, in a delicious twist of fate, was also about a kid who couldn’t go to school (although in his case because it had been destroyed in the blitz) – it was just about the best weather-related thing ever to happen. If I ever feel bad for Fish, who has a bunch of weather qualifications and yet saw his reputation defined by this one wrong call, it’s because I enjoyed that day so much that I feel I owe him.
Ten years ago this month, the Met Office began naming storms with Abigail, which (who?) was unremarkable, unless you lived in the Outer Hebrides, where the schools closed and the power shut down, so nobody could even go to the cinema. That’s the thing about weather: it’s very unevenly distributed. There’s no way of getting those with the broadest shoulders to carry the heaviest weight. Storm Claudia, which has just passed, killed a woman in the Algarve and caused catastrophic flooding in south Wales, while everyone outside its path merely looked up, wondered whether it was named after Claudia Winkleman (it wasn’t – it was named by the Spanish meteorological agency), and went on with their day.
