The North by North Westminster Diary: Storm Abigail "A Desperate Attempt to Make British Weather Sound Badass"

Thursday 12^th November

It must have happened at some kind of meteorological conference.

A bunch of weather forecasters from the Met Office were sat on a table next to some flash Americans who were talking about their experiences covering Hurricane This and Hurricane That, and then mocking their British and Irish counterparts for having to talk about light drizzle the whole time.

So, they hit the whiskey and come up with an idea.

“Let’s give our storms names! You know, like they do. That’ll make our weather sound much more badass.”

And that is why, this morning, we’re hearing a lot about Storm Abigail. Which is just a regular storm, with some amber weather warnings. Except now, it all sounds very serious, and Carol Kirkwood is telling me how we’re all going to be “affected” by Storm Abigail, and the inevitable happened on The Today Programme when a climate change campaigner called it “Hurricane Abigail”.

The thing is, it won’t change anything for the meteorologists at the convention, because they’ll be talking about Storm Barry or Storm Cheryl, and then the Yankees will say “Well, this year’s hurricane caused $10bn worth of damage. How much did Storm Derek cause?”

“Errr… well the post office was shut and there were no fresh catches at the fishmongers in time for the weekend.”

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