Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

You are right! I just checked my business diary (have kept 'em all since
83). I went to Belgium to help run a customer course Sunday 11th, got
stopped in the Mercedes at the border into Belgium and they took the
interior of the car apart. They never said why. My colleague was behind me
with a van full of computers (I think they were prototype or early release
RISC machines) and sailed straight through. (He got stopped on the way back
out on that Friday, had to take the machines back to la Hulpe and dump them
- another story!) I came back on the Friday, landed at Dover late evening
and drove back as I said. On my way through London (streets full of debris
and tree branches, little traffic about) to get to Bayswater I passed near
Sloane Square and remember a building still on fire somewhere around there.

We seem to have settled into a pattern of high winds since 87, though never
quite as bad as that. I bought my flat in Chiswick December that year, and
most years until I left I lost a tile or two from the roof through winds.

In fact, since 1987 (maybe) we've had all sorts of "wrong" weather
conditions.

- In the autumn (fall) we regularly have all sorts of problems on the
railways with leaves on lines resulting in trains being stranded or running
late. Railtrack, the company which "runs" the railway tracks ("run" being
only an approximate verb) has resorted to various methods of dealing with
leaves, including removing trees adjacent to tracks. But we always seem to
have the wrong sort of leaves. My local railway company, WAGN, even
published a "Leaf Timetable" last September, which showed late starting
times and delayed journey times built into the timetable!

- About this time last year we had a snowfall. I measured it in my back
yard - it was an inch deep. 20 to 30 miles to my east, in Essex, it was 2
inches deep, and the whole of that side of England ground to a halt for a
couple of days. People were stranded in cars and stations, and the motorway
M11 was littered with abandoned vehicles. It was the wrong sort of snow.

- The main railway line through Devon and Cornwall runs along the edge of
the beach in a town in Devon called Dawlish. 50 years ago we used to go on
holiday there, I used to swim in the sea, and train-spot from the beach.
Recently the seas have been breaking so hard onto that beach that they've
splashed over Richard Branson's trains, screwed up their electrics, and
brought them to a halt. Wrong sort of sea.

- Usually each summer we have a hosepipe ban somewhere, due to reservoirs
being empty. It's nearly always in Kent. We had a dry summer last year, but
have had lots of rain recently. The water companies are still worried,
however, because it was the wrong sort of rain - driving rain, which runs
off the surface into the rivers, causing floods, rather than steady
drizzle, which soaks the ground.