A universally shared experience is not always universally shared. Sometimes you can completely fail to describe something because there is no common place for two minds to meet. Sometimes you just can’t describe a turd as a turd. There’s even more trouble is the person in question has never seen an abandoned Mars Bar floating in a swimming pool.
Ah, the weather.
That bastion of small talk. The one thing we can all discuss. The one universal, shared experience. Where would we be without the weather?
I mean, obviously, without the discussion of the weather, not weather itself. That would be a bit weird. What would the world be like with no weather at all?
What, exactly, counts as weather?
I guess no weather at all would be dry, calm and warm.
Rain and clouds are weather. Wind is weather, or possibly the byproduct of too much curry and beans.
Is temperature weather? Come to think of it, how the fuck does temperature actually work anyway? I get the whole Earth’s relative position in relation to the sun thing.
A 23.44 degree tilt in the Earth’s axis that creates seasons as the planet rotates around a big ball of hot gas (which incidentally was one of my nicknames at school).
That describes seasonal weather. How does non-seasonal weather work?
How come some days, in the middle of winter, it’s actually quite warm?
You’re sitting on the sofa in the morning, contemplating another day. Trying to decide if you should sand the manatees down or if that particular unpleasant task will wait until tomorrow. You’re sitting in your pyjamas and your comfy slippers, drinking a nice, hot mug of sweet tea. Another day in paradise. (Providing, of course, that the manatees will wait and you don’t have to spend three hours scraping barnacles off the undercarriage of an enraged, smelly, sea beast.)
You’re safe in the knowledge that you know how weather works, how seasons work.
It’s winter. Should be cold, right?
But it’s not! It’s actually quite warm and sunny. And people talk about how unseasonably warm it is.
“Nice weather for this time of year, innit?”
All that jazz.
Why does that happen then?
The Earth didn’t just wake up that morning and shuffle a bit closer to the sun for warmth. The Sun didn’t burn a bit brighter for a few hours on that one day. The Sun tends to work in much longer time periods than a Tuesday morning or a Thursday afternoon.
Maybe you go outside dressed in fifteen layers of unnecessary clothing or maybe you just turn the TV on to check the weather report. Either way, it’s a shock.
And now I find myself, as I keep doing lately, in a bit of a problem area.
The duality of my reality.
Reality duality! Ha ha ha!
I don’t know what I’m on about.
Anyway. I keep finding myself in a quandary.
It’s amazing how much of our language and basic communication is heavily reliant on shared experience. It’s very hard to describe something to someone with no experience of the thing you’re trying to describe.
How the fuck would you describe Piers Morgan to someone who had never seen a rancid turd?
I have spent most of my life living in Britain. I am British. My brain runs on Britishness Version 2.1.
(They patched version 1.0 to stop the Brits trying to take over the world and create empires all the damn time.
Version 2.1 was a minor media based upgrade from 2.0.
Without that, the Spice Girls, Brit Pop and Cool Britannia could never have happened. Version 2.0 only cared about The Beatles, Queen and the Rolling Stones.
Think of it like the upgrade to Windows Media Player, now you don’t really need anything else to play media. I’m not saying you shouldn’t mess around with VLC or anything like that, just that you don’t HAVE to.
Before that, we were all stuck fucking around with Real Player, DivX, QuickTime, Winamp and all sorts of bits of random codecs and weird shit)
My brain runs Britishness 2.1 and is a bit like Macs and macOS, it won’t run anything else. It’s proprietary hardware.
Try to run something like a metaphorical Linux on my brain and it’s just going to forget how to display video, fail to connect to the printer, shit itself and shut down for no reason.
This is why, when I write about waking up and sitting on a sofa in a dressing gown and some carpet slippers, which is extremely British to begin with, the early morning beverage of choice for me is a ‘big, hot mug of sweet tea’ and not a ‘cup of cwarffee’.
But now, I am an Australian resident and have been for a while. My understanding of daily life has been Australianised.
So when I talk about seasons, for example. My hindbrain, the part that has had its knowledge calcified by years and years of identical experiences says:
‘Winter be January and that be cold and summer be June and that be hot’.
But my forebrain, the bit that houses daily life says:
‘But summer be January and that be hot and winter be June and that be still hot but not as hot as be January.’
Might be snow at Christmas- there is no snow no more no more.
The sea is cold, brown and full of glass – the sea is warm and clear but maybe full of sharks.
Magpies are cute – magpies are lethal.
We drive on the left – we drive on the left (not the best example).
Trains are always late, sometimes nonexistent, expensive, constantly full, and smell of vomit – trains are always on time, cheap, fast and never full.
You get my point. The shared experience thing has gone a bit haywire for me.
I always find myself second guessing things which, a few short years ago, I wouldn’t have.
Like the weather.
Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about writing some silly joke about the weather:
“I turned on the telly to check the weather;
‘Beginning grey and overcast with a slight frost through to mid-morning. Grey and overcast into the afternoon with drizzle and the occasional sad, little shower.
Grey and overcast with more miserable, soggy drizzle, existential dread and depression heading into the evening. Temperatures rarely getting above 8 degrees. Medium chance of eggs, fried, overdone with no yolk to dip your toast in.
Your weather summary for today: Cold, grey, damp, cold, wet, grey, dark, cold, wet and cold.’
So…the usual then.”
It works. The Brits know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe they do a little laugh.
Maybe they think, “Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick! This guy waffling on about bullshit again! Will he ever shut the fuck up?”
No.
No, I won’t.
Never.
But now.
Now a bit of kangaroo juice and koala vomit has entered my system. Now my view of the world has skewed somewhat in a different direction, weather wise.
Now…
“I turned on the telly to check the weather;
“Hot. Hotter than the Devil’s ball sack. Starting off in the morning with blazing sunshine attempting to melt your skin. The afternoon will continue to be hot, in fact getting hotter as the day progresses, hotter and hotter.
High chance of drowning in your own sweat as your brain slowly boils in your skull. Miniscule chance of one, tiny, wispy, solitary cloud mid-afternoon that we can all stare at and shout ‘What the fuck is that thing!’ while pointing at the sky.
Proceeding into the evening, it will be hot. Confusingly hot given the Sun is off to melt someone else on the other side of the planet, but somehow, it’s still just as fucking hot. No wind, not even a little breeze to cool you down. Good luck trying to sleep, ever.
There may be a giant, apocalyptic thunderstorm, but there may also not be.
There may be torrential rainfall for precisely 2.7 minutes out of every 30. There may also not be. Who knows? Not us. It’s all just guesswork at this point. It will still be hot whatever the situation.
A high of 125 degrees and a low of 124.9 degrees.”
So…the usual then.”
Same joke, different shared experience.
It’s become a source of real confusion for me. I am trying to describe a universally understood situation but finding that it’s not so universal.
A Brit would look at that cold, grey, grey, cold and soggy bit and think; ‘Yep, sounds about right’. Accepted. Understood.
But an Aussie? Not the same thing.
And vice versa for the rant about hotness.
Is this it now? Whenever I write anything I have to include two versions of points like that to be understood by everyone? Do I have that sort of time and patience? I really don’t know what to do about it.
And I still haven’t figured out how you get the occasional warm day in winter.
Now, please excuse me, I have manatees to scrape.
