To Snow? or Not To Snow?

It may be a white Christmas, but then again, it may not. We may get snow this week, but we may not. The reason the British obsess on the weather is that we often don't know from one day to the next - or even one hour to the next - what it is going to do. To give you an idea of just how unpredictable British weather is, here is an extract from the BBC's online monthly outlook forecast (which comes from the Meteorological Office. If they don't know, nobody does):

"Confidence is rising that on Thursday night significant snow will fall in eastern England and during Friday significant snow is possible in Northern Ireland Wales and western England. If confidence lowers then please unread the last paragraph."

Apparently the BBC decided this was too vague, or too ungrammatical, as the last sentence was later deleted, but I thought it summed up the impossibility of British weather forecasting.

While I had weather on my mind, I browsed some weather quotes. Some were negative:
"The weather is like the government, always in the wrong." (Jerome K. Jerome)

But this one was refreshingly cheerful:
“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.” (John Ruskin)

And putting my blog firmly in its place:
“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” (Oscar Wilde)