It's the Weather People's latest technique for getting in the news.
In the old days they'd issue a forecast based on their computer model of it always being hotter than yesterday, and say we'd have barbecue summers, tropical heatwaves in July, Indian summers and lager winters. But they were always wrong, and deservedly laughed to shame.
So now they have introduced the concept of a "Yellow alert". I'm guessing a yellow weather alert is two down from red, and one up from green. Perhaps with bronze alert and primrose alert available for those tricky not-quite-so-clear alerts.
Far as I can tell, "yellow alert" means that they don't think anything serious is going to happen, but they've not been in the news for a week or two. It has the great advantage that, if nothing happens, they can say "it wasn't a specific warning - just a yellow alert".
Now I reckon that we have three tends that can conveniently come together here. One is that nobody believes the Met Office any more, because they are, by and large, pants. Another is that, despite that first point, everybody has a desperate urge to hear scary weather stories. Aand the third is that the Government wants to save and/or make some money. So I suggest, bringing these three threads together, that the Government sell the Met Office to Sky Sports. The taxpayers make some money, the Met Office can talk even greater tripe - along with Geoff from the Football programmers saying "Lucky for Total Network Solutions they won 2-0 today over Cefn Druids - especially with that plague of frogs forecast" and we all feel like the world is more exciting than in fact it is. Then on the terrestrial channels, as they were once known, we can replace the pointless, fake-excitement-generating weather people with people's nans, who can just appear on the screen wearing headscarfs and pac-a-macs and say "It's September. It might rain" or - as it might be in Husborne Crawley- "Looks black over Leighton".
Just one thought though - when your local weather people issue a "Yellow alert of rain", do you think what I think? Yes, thought so. Ugh.
Hurricane Katia is about to hit us and you don't think it's serious? Don't you remember 1987? But then of course that hurricane didn't get as far north as Husborne Crawley. I was in rural Northamptonshire that day and didn't discover for several days what my parents had been through in Kent. Will something similar hit Husborne Crawley this weekend? Who knows? So keep your tealights well sheltered!
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