Tag: weather

Brolly issue

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Amazing. Here I am wondering what to blog about today and then it drops into my lap onto my screen, courtesy of News24 commenter Krolie, who took full advantage of an article on the wintery weather (which missed Cape Town almost completely) to vent his or her spleen over a long-standing issue which has clearly caused a lot of pent up frustration:

For the past 20 years I each year bought an umbrella in the hope that THIS time it will do what it is supposed to, but alas, if you exit the door and there is something just stronger than a breeze, your umbrella takes another shape whipping the other way round and well, your next best hope is for a bit of water to use this useless object as a boat of sorts.
Anybody else find an umbrella pretty useless in the WC in the middle of winter? CT is well known for people hugging lampposts, even grabbing towards the closest human zipping past you as if hell bent to win a marthon.
Yip, even your rainjacket ends up not being so protective as it is renowned to do – whipping up and down and all over the place, including the clothes you’re wearing underneath. You might as well put your clothes in a packet, tie it to your body and streak down Adderley Steet, because wet you will be to the skin, no matter what you do. At least you’t hopefully have some dry clothes at the end of your “flight”.

Just wondering what the use is of a umbrella/brolly really is in this kind of weather…

Is Krolie mad? Einstein thinks so:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

When May comes around, and Krolie heads for the local umbrella shop, is there not some small hint, some glimmer of a memory that when s/he is doing is utterly pointless and has been proven so on many separate occasions over the previous two decades?

I have to say too, that it appears some degree of artistic licence has been employed here. I have never hugged a lamppost in Cape Town – there are always too many posters on them for one’s arms to get a firm grip – nor have I ever grabbed the closest human to me. The latter is an extremely dangerous means of protecting one’s self from the rain anyway. South Africans know how to fight off muggers and you’re more than likely to find yourself lying in a pool of blood, not water, with your brolly stuck somewhere where the sun don’t shine (that’s PE this week).

So people, do not buy an umbrella in the misguided hope it will keep you dry in Cape Town’s wind. And do not streak down Adderley Street. It’s not clever, and in these sort of meteorological conditions, it certainly won’t be big either.

Calibration is key

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There’s no point in firing off pictures of your car’s thermometer reading (or any other thermometer reading in fact) and just expecting us to believe what it says. For a genuine and accurate measurement, you need a laboratory thermometer calibrated by the Cape Metrology Centre and then you need to pop it outside at ten past three on a Tuesday afternoon and see what happens.

Which is this:

It should probably be noted that we actually got a high of 50.9°C, but were too slow with the camera. However, with another scorcher on offer tomorrow and records to be broken, there may be a case for doing a repeat reading during our lunch break, when it may be even hotter.

As eagle-eyed readers will note, our Thermamite 1 is very capable of taking on up to four times what the South African sun can throw at it, infra-red wise.

(You should see what the Thermamite 2 can do…)

So we’re completely ready for tomorrow: Bring it on! (just as long as we can skulk back to the safety of our air-conditioned laboratory immediately afterwards. Thanks.)

UPDATE: Repeated experiment at 1300 CAT the following day yields unsurprising result:

And yes, obviously that’s in the sun – just like those cricketers down the road are…

You done now?

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Probably because I suggested that last weekend might have been the first weekend of summer, the South Atlantic, in an entirely successful bid to prove me wrong, threw one more big winter storm our way. It came through early on Sunday morning and stayed throughout the day, causing instant cabin fever amongst the junior members of the 6000 clan.

It wasn’t like that on Saturday.

We fed ducks, climbed trees, bounced on bouncy castles and generally had a lot of fun despite not smashing any plates before Daddy headed south beyond the Lentil Curtain and won some fabulous prizes in a pub quiz. All good.

Sunday was less fun and the only trip out of the safety of the house was to stock up on essentials at Constantia Village, where the vast array of homemade garden ornaments on sale by the roadside had been scythed down by the vicious northwester and were now a pile of homemade garden ornaments on sale by the roadside.

From the photographic evidence above, it would appear that in order to survive this sort of weather, you needed to be a stylised pelican. More accurate representations of South African ornithological highlights were doomed. Especially the heron on the left.
We’ve had more of the same hefty meteorology today and while I enjoy such bleak, downright elemental conditions, I’m completely ready for some sunshine now, please.

Thank you.

Off out

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I’m off out for the monthly Molton Brown Boys dinner this evening in some of the filthiest weather Cape Town has seen in weeks.

On occasions like this, it’s hugely important to remember that this is just a passing cold front and winter – which has only really just begun – will all be over in a few weeks time. This thinned sunset taken in Noordhoek in February will hopefully serve as a reminder that better days lie ahead.

Right. Now I’m going to try and find where my car has floated off to.

Models of Perception

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With the World Cup just 19 days away, we have had a utterly superb spell of weather in Cape Town. Lest you forget, since we are in the bottom half of the world, geographically speaking, the tournament is going to fall right in the middle of winter here. And, since probably the biggest medium-term benefit of hosting 31 countries and the entire world’s TV audience is the opportunity for everyone to see what a great place this is to visit, the weather could play a huge part in the world’s perception.

While Jo’burg has the official broadcast centre, many individual networks, including the influential BBC and Sky Sports, are choosing to base their anchor teams in Cape Town. It’s a decision that they may regret and so may we.
When you choose to base yourself in a glass box about 200m from the South Atlantic Ocean in the middle of winter, you’re taking a big chance. If the weather is like it was today, you’ve hit the jackpot as the sun goes down with peachy-orange goodness and illuminates the City Bowl for a winning backdrop.
But we’ll be VERY lucky to get away with that on each of the 31 days of the competition. In fact, I’d go so far as to say there’s absolutely no chance of 31 peachy-orange specials. If we’d held it in January, we’d be sorted. But no – apparently that would have clashed with the domestic seasons in Argentina, Brazil, North Korea, Denmark, Germany, South Africa, Ghana, Uruguay, France, Paraguay, Portugal, Turkey, Spain, Australia and Japan, to mention but a few. And Turkey didn’t even qualify.

But I digress.

The fact is that the weather in Cape Town is far more likely to be bloody awful. Grey, wet, cold and windy. Like it was last week. The BBC’s rooftop fishtank is going to be rather exposed.
If it even survives.  
Last week’s miserable meterology almost put me off living here. And if it rains like that during the World Cup (and it might), I sense very damp and very despondent fans and possibly even postponed or abandoned games. And Gary Lineker taking the p!ss.
All of which is going to put viewers off Cape Town and South Africa as a potential holiday destination.

Guys, it’s still not too late for my big sponge idea.