Always Take The Weather With You

Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-five, forty, forty-five. Take your pick. Choose a number and let it be the temperature. There is a colossal amount of old pony that gets trotted out in the name of the weather. Let's go back, shall we, to the summer. The highest temperature in the north of the island was 42.3 in Sa Pobla. There may have been somewhere else, Muro town for example, that was a fraction hotter, but Sa Pobla is the main weather station. It is not by the coast, as to be by the coast does give a different value; the temperatures are always lower, by a factor of at least three degrees. During the very hot summer, there was never a time when the temperature reached 48. But there were some who would have you believe it did. Had it, not only would it have been massive news locally, it would have registered across the world, so extreme would it have been. The 42 was, in itself, extreme - for Mallorca. And 42 was quite damn hot enough; don't wish for anything higher, for God's sake.

Let's now come to October. Notwithstanding the return of storms on Friday, the temperatures have been unseasonably high. But not that high. Not as high as thirty-four, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, all of which have been reported. The official highest has again been in Sa Pobla, in the interior, away from the coast where it is always cooler. That high was 32. By the coast, it would have been 29 at most, when the highest temperatures were registered midweek. But we still get the exaggerated reports, and, by now, one would have thought that the message might have got through that thermometers in direct sunlight and indeed many little thermometers hanging on the terrace are far from accurate. For those values that are cited are those that are given by either a dodgy thermometer or one in the sun; they are not the ones given out by the meteorologists. We may not always believe weather forecasts, but I, for one, cannot query the actual temperatures the met boys record.

There is, though, the question as to why some people feel moved to report what are exaggerated values. It is a curious psychology, one that varies between boastfulness and one-upmanship and a desire - at all costs - to big somewhere up and make it appear wonderful. It is especially curious as anything much over 27 or 28 degrees becomes less than pleasant for anything other than a trip to the beach. Who needs 36 or 37? No-one is the answer, so why exaggerate the temperature to make it so, when it isn't? It is doubly especially curious that one might take the weather with one as a means of some sort of self-aggrandizement, parading around with an imaginary t-shirt saying "I am 38 degrees" and then when back in freezing England, getting the same t-shirt out and sitting down in the centrally-heated warmth of the neighbour's house, showing the inevitable photos of when it was 38 or even 48. "It was 48 degrees when we were there." "Was it really?" "Ooh, yes, ever so hot."

The bigging-it-up psychology is part of the same "beautiful" motif. It (wherever it is) is "beautiful" because the temperature says so, even if the temperature is not as is reported. And one still has the question as to why a 33 should be more beautiful than 25. Much of this comes down to a sort of justification of existence, itself a facet of the self-aggrandizement-through-weather mentality. We live by the weather, we always takes the weather with us, and much as we may be prone to exaggerate almost anything, there is nothing more exaggerated than what is truly registered on a thermometer - one that works properly and in the right conditions.


QUIZ
Today's title - "Everywhere you go, ..."

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)