Spanish Plume

Thursday May 4

It's funny; you go all your life and you've never heard of something... then it turns out to have been around for years. Forever, even. Today, we're in a Spanish Plume! According to the weatherpeople, we get them regularly. Apparently, they're a chunk of hot air that come up from Spain every now and then and covers the UK in gorgeous sunny weather. Well who'd have guessed? Why haven't we been told before? Me, I think the whole weather forecast game is a scam akin to astrology and feng shui. They have to keep coming up with new and complex-sounding stuff to sound as if they know better than we do what they're doing.

Either way, though, it's a welcome change after the long cold start to spring - even the daffodils are still flowering and the leaves have barely broken on the hawthorn hedges. The local economy is dependent on tourism and farming, so it matters more to people here than elsewhere.

And weather is more visible to us out here than in the cities. We've got so much sky and, being so flat, we're aware as soon as we go outside, where the wind is coming from. In winter, when it's from the East - there's nothing much in its way between its beginnings in the Russian Steppes, gathering speed over the North Sea and into the Fens - where it howls and shrieks over the frozen dykes till it rattles our window panes as we huddle by the fire. If there's one place in the world a weather forecaster can hardly ever be wrong - it's here.. as long as all he sticks to saying is "tomorrow will be windy and changeable". Oh, unless there's a Spanish Plume on the way.