A Very British Obsession

‘You’re very brave’ is a phrase that we heard from quite a few people when my partner, Penny, and I first announced that we were moving to Greece about four years ago. If the truth be told, I don’t think either of us have ever really understood why we were being ‘brave' exactly.

Was it brave to sell up everything in England and travel 1,000 miles to Greece in an elderly VW camper van in the vague hope of finding a smallholding we could buy? - A little rash perhaps or even completely mad, but hardly ‘brave’. On the contrary, it might have been more accurate to say we were being cowardly as, to some extent, we were running away from certain aspects of British life. Let me explain…

As everyone knows, people in Britain are obsessed by the weather. It is by far the most frequent topic of conversation and even complete strangers waiting for a bus will spend a couple of minutes discussing how good/bad the weather is at the moment and what it is likely to do later.

As many of you will remember, ‘Turned out nice again’ was even the catchphrase of a ukelele-playing comedian called George Formby many years ago. In fact, the weather features heavily in all walks of British life. For instance, just think about the vast number of songs there are with titles like ‘Here Comes the Sun‘, ‘It's Raining in My Heart’ and ‘Fog on the Tyne‘.

So endemic is this obsession in Britain that I believe it should be classified as a notifiable disease. It could even be given its own TLA (three letter acronym) such as MOD - Meteorologically Obsessive Disorder. Don't be fooled into thinking that it's just a harmless way of passing a few minutes when you can't think of anything else to talk about. Oh no.

The seriousness of the condition lies in its complete lack of foundation in logic and sufferers should be pitied in much the same way as someone who goes around claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte (unless of course he happens to be a short, balding Frenchman who was born in 1769 and was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington).

My point is that, given that the weather in Britain is almost always rubbish, why do the Brits feel the need to talk about it all the time? Why not just accept that it's rubbish and talk about something more interesting like the price of fish? But no, we still have to have the incessantly repeated dialogues which go:

HE: Weather's a bit rubbish today.

SHE: Yes it is, isn't it.

HE: Do you think it'll be rubbish later on?

SHE: Probably.


I have to confess that, as an Englishman myself, I am not in the least immune from the affliction of being weather obsessed - a true MOD sufferer in fact. It was mainly for this reason that we moved to Greece, not only to escape the rubbish weather in Britain but, more importantly, to escape the endless discussions about it.

It has to be said, however, that in the three-and-a-half years we’ve been here, I am still a long way from being cured of my affliction. For instance, only yesterday (when the temperature was almost 40 degrees), I found myself saying “Hot today, isn’t it” to the woman who was filling my car with petrol.

Not unnaturally, her response was to look at me quizzically, then up at the sky, and then back at me again before shrugging and saying, “It’s August. What do you expect, you stupid English moron?” Okay, she didn’t actually say the ‘stupid English moron’ bit but she might just as well have done as it was heavily implied by her tone of voice.

Well, she had a point of course, but I don’t like silences and I had to say something. Perhaps she’d have engaged more if I’d said, “I see the price of red mullet’s gone up again”.


(c) Xerika
November 2007