The big freeze and the politics of avoidance

Ireland is a temperate place by European standards. It does not suffer from the extremes (in weather, that is) seen in other Northern climes. In winter, the average temperature is 5 ºC; in summer, it is 15 ºC. This beats the – 40 ºC in Canada or northern Europe, but it does mean that the weather is just grey, cold and awful most of the time.

This year, though, the winter has been particularly cold, snowy and icy – 2010 was ushered in with heavy snowfall and a big freeze icing over pavements and roads for a few weeks. Apparently, it was the worst cold spell in 30 years.

That said, and at the risk of stating the obvious or egging global warming on, winter occurs every year. Winter nights fall below freezing point in December and January year in and year out. Given this, you would think people would be ready for whatever winter delivers. Of course, they are not.

There is never enough machinery to de-ice the roads, airports grind to a halt and it is common for schools to close after an inch or two of snow. One year, I even witnessed an airport worker sweeping snow off an aeroplane wing with a household broom. I was delighted when my flight was cancelled.

Basically, when it snows, a level of panic and bewilderment sets in. I am not saying that conditions cannot be treacherous on the roads, because they can be. But the way people react leaves one thinking it never snows and freezing temperatures are a very rare occurrence indeed.

In South Africa, things are no better. Every year, winter in South Africa is treated as some sort of alien that springs itself upon the masses unexpectedly. When I lived in Johannesburg, I was never prepared for it, despite its predictable arrival.

I would mope about a freezing tiled- floor flat, complaining about how cold it was. Every year, I had to buy a new heater. It never occurred to me to insulate better or install a heating system. I seemed, along with the rest of the country, content with complaining and feeling surprised by the obvious.

But why do we do this?

One possible explanation is that there is a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ when it comes to weather, both in the global North and in the South.

In Ireland and the UK, people believe that, there, the climate is not too different to more accommodating parts of the world. The notion of a temperate climate is equated with mild winters and balmy summers. In South Africa, the notion of a good climate is confused with the idea that there is no such thing as winter.

It was the English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who coined the phrase ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’, in 1817. He was talking about literature. A writer, says Coleridge, can put some “semblance of truth” into a fantasy story and readers often oblige by immersing themselves in the story, even if the storyline is far-fetched.

Just like a fairy tale, the majority, certainly in the UK and Ireland, believe the myth that they do not live in one of the grimmest climates in the world. These misguided beliefs help people survive the gloom, but they also, like the secondary gain of engrossing oneself in a fantasy story, provide entertainment.

The joy comes in the telling, especially when the story inevitably deviates from the fantastical narrative that summers are warm and dry, and winters reasonable. In the last few weeks, in Europe, the media has gone into overdrive. The same happens every summer when it rains, and it always rains – a lot.

All anyone can talk about is the weather in these circumstances. It seems the weather provides a distraction from concerning oneself with the daily deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, poverty in Africa and Europe, or why the weather seems extreme, in the first place.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 15 January 2010. as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Let’s face it, holidays are strange

Photo by Vicko Mozara on Unsplash

Currently, I am on a northern hemisphere summer break, although I should say an alleged summer break. There are two reasons for this. 

Firstly, in Ireland and England, there is no summer. Summer is something you know everyone else is having while you sit in the rain, trying to remember what sunshine feels like. The easiest way to deal with this lack of summer is to travel abroad, but this is costly in these credit crunch days. So I find myself sitting at a British family resort trying to learn the difference between light showers, squally showers, rain and heavy rain. Secondly, I must admit, I also struggle with the whole concept of a holiday.

It is not that I am one of those grumpy people who do not like holidays. I love them – it is the idea I find weird.

People not only work to pay bills, but also so that they can have a break from work. Apparently, to enjoy your break, you cannot simply have a break – we are all so conditioned that we must do something with it. This something is called a holiday. Holidays cost money. So, in other words, you work to get money to pay others for the pleasure of not working. This strikes me as logical as banging your head against a wall because it feels good when you stop.

Of course, one option is to choose not to work at all and then go on holiday, which then means you are paying others to add something to your otherwise empty schedule. But being unemployed is not a comfortable state of affairs and makes buying time at a holiday resort rather difficult. The result of this is that it makes those of us who are employed happy enough to continue to pay not to work.

There are further problems. If you choose to stay at home on your break, now dubbed the ‘staycation’, it feels as if you are not on holiday. And if you choose not to stay at home, and if you are not lucky enough to have a second home at the beach or in the mountains, your choices are limited. Either you have to book a holiday home in some remote spot, or you have to sell your soul to a hotel group.

In exchange for money, hotels are happy to provide you with all the structure you need in your day to prevent you from feeling too far from work. They also promise endless entertainment from belly-dancing classes to parasailing and, unlike an isolated holiday cottage, guarantee your children can get to interact with others in play parks and swimming pools. This, in turn, helps your child learn valuable social skills.

For example, this holiday, my two-and-a-half-year-old son learned that one should never trust anyone, especially someone who wants the same toy as you. This valuable lesson was brought to him by a covetous toddler who attached himself to my son’s cheek with his teeth in an unprovoked playground attack. This left us wishing we had opted for the isolated holiday cottage.

For me, this sums up the core dilemma of holidays. Either you have to share purpose-built spaces and activities with others who might turn out to be little Mike Tysons, more interested in biting off ears than cooperative play, or you have to seclude yourself from the world, losing the advantage of having someone else laying all the entertainment you need at your doorstep.

So there is no perfect holiday, only moments of bliss and disaster. Every holiday has its price, whether it is inclement weather, a nasty souvenir bite, a little bit too much isolation, or too many structured activities that leave you exhausted and in need of another vacation. I long to find the balance, but I just don’t have enough free time to find it.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 22 August 2008 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Always take the weather with you

What would we do without the weather? When unsure what to speak about or write about, for that matter, there’s always the weather. When conversation dries up, you can seek safety in a discussion about a climatic disaster. As singer Tom Waits says, “strangers talk about the weather”.

Before I moved to the northern hemisphere, I never knew the significance of the weather or that it could be such a large part of daily discussion. People talk about it all the time. But it is not only strangers who use it to break the ice. Everyone spends time analysing the weather and, after enduring a few winters here, I know why. The weather is so foul you are forced to consider its impact. Of course, it is not all dreadful. On the odd day in July, the sun can shine and temperatures can occasionally sneak up to 25 ?C. These days are generally marked by two occurrences. Firstly, the streets are transformed into a riot of colour that ranges from transparent white flesh through to sunburned lobster-red flesh. Secondly, good weather is greeted with a flurry of capitalist zeal. People rush out to buy new braais or barbecues, along with matching garden furniture and other garden knickknacks from gnomes to cheap Japanese water features.

These two phenomena can easily be explained. The former is about relative deprivation. The latter is the product of what psychologists call interval reinforcement. Behavioural psychologists can get a pigeon to peck a disc when rewarded with food. Interestingly, you can get a pigeon to peck consistently either by rewarding and reinforcing its behaviour after a standard number of pecks, or by only occasionally rewarding it at average variable intervals. The potential reward is enough to get the creature to peck unrewarded, no matter how irregular or limited the reward is. This is why gamblers gamble, and why having the odd warm day can get people to buy a ton of outdoor equipment that will invariably rust in the rain for the rest of the year. In fact, the more you think about it, the world works like this all the time. We vote for politicians who only occasionally carry through their promises. We buy lottery tickets because someone wins every now and then. Despite such rewards being largely erratic, we con ourselves into believing that they are predictable. We even invent things to make us feel the world is explainable. When it comes to weather, it is the TV forecast that is the technology that leads us down this path of compulsive behaviour.

There are two types of people in the world – those that watch the forecast and those that do not. Watching the weather forecast in the northern hemisphere is as pointless as taking water skis with you on a camel safari in the Sahara. The forecast varies largely between dull, rainy and grey, and rainy, grey and dull. Forecasting warm days is equally as pointless, as it only leads to irrational social behaviour, as I explained. Of course, the forecast can be helpful in predicting major disasters but, on a day-to-day basis, it is reality TV for the clinically inane and groundlessly optimistic. I think we should return to the good old days when weather watching actually involved nature and an interaction with the world beyond plastic graphically-represented clouds

 So this is what I have learnt in these northern climes: if cows are lying down in a field, it is going to rain; if swallows are flying backwards, there is a fierce wind, and if your cat bolts across your garden seemingly being pelted with golf balls, it is probably hailing. More importantly, you just have to take the weather as it comes while paying heed to the wise words of Billy Connolly: there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 23 June 2006 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.