Last year in May the world renowned Meteorological Office unveiled Britain’s’ most powerful supercomputer which cost £30 million and is capable of making one thousand billion calculations a second, all of them wrong. The computer is so huge it is stored in a building the size of two football pitches and has the mental capacity of a Premiership football player. It has enabled the crack team of scientists to accurately publish in-exact weather forecasts on a daily basis and make long range predictions with all the precision of Stevie Wonder firing a blunderbuss.
“It’ll be a barbeque summer”, they shouted, over the roar of heavy rain thundering down on our heads in the wettest period seen on earth since Noah was afloat. “It’ll be a mild winter”, they called above the chatter of teeth in the coldest spell since the Vikings skated over the North Atlantic for a spot of light pillaging over a thousand years ago. It is so not mild this winter that even polar bears are applying for the government’s emergency winter fuel payment.
The weather forecasters, noticing that they couldn’t move their fingers, their feet had got frostbite and their lips had fallen off, have now changed their minds and their forecast is for cold. They also predict that the time is whatever it says on your watch, that today is Saturday and, going out on a limb here, that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow. The Met Office is run by the Ministry of Defence and easily meets the high standards that have made the MOD a byword for excellence and efficiency the whole world over. Money well spent.