🌧️ Table Talk #69: A National Oddity 🦜

TABLE TALK #69

The weather is somewhat of a national obsession. As Brits, we use it as a conversational crutch, a get-out-of-jail free card of sorts, second only to “up to much this weekend?” 

🍡 AMUSE-BOUCHES 🍡

Enjoy: Kricket's inaugural Fried Chicken Challenge.
Explore: the best restaurants for a relaxing meal alone.
Look: Palm Report's glorious image gallery.

🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝

Lighter evenings and wonderfully crisp, clear days are almost certain to give you a spring in your step. The early emergence of bulbs across the nation’s flowerbeds and a collective sense that the worst of winter is behind us belies a quiet uptick in our moods.

Over this past week, we’ve found ourselves torn between relishing the clarity of thought that seems to accompany a brisk walk on a crystal clear morning and thoughts of longer, warmer days that your mind inevitably wanders towards. And therein lies the crux, the oddity that underpins our national obsession with talking about the weather. When we talk about the weather, what we’re really doing is saying “well this is a bit sh*t, I wish it was sunnier” without explicitly doing so for fear of fomenting a mass emigration to sunnier climes.

 
A beautiful encapsulation of our changing seasons

On reflection and on speaking with some of our readers, I think this points to a deeper quirk of our psyches - never quite being happy with our lot. Here, in this context, we’re just talking about the weather but in many respects, I think it’s a perfect encapsulation of this most human of frailties.

In winter, we spend our darkened days dreaming of long evenings, lazy days spent in the sun and of not needing to wear four layers to leave the house. Yet bizarrely, come summer - and last summer was an extreme example - we spent our whole time complaining, announcing that we can’t wait for this to end so that we can get a decent night’s sleep and go longer than three hours without needing a shower. 

So today, when you’re walking along or looking out of the window, stop to take in the majesty of our seasons, to enjoy our variable climate and our national psyche for the glorious oddities that they are.

🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮

Ever wondered how London’s Docklands came to be? Us neither, but once you get a sniff of the real story, we guarantee you’ll be hooked.

BBC’s latest Sunday night drama, The Gold, does a brilliant job of telling the story of 1983's somewhat accidental Brink’s-Mat gold heist and the way that same metal found its way irreversibly into our lives in more ways than one. 

Police in the aftermath of the heist