Rain Later?

One of the difficult things at the moment is getting a good local weather forecast here.

Normally I’d use MétéoFrance’s internet site but, during my monthly talk with Alex at France Telecom two weeks ago, he said that there were unspecified “technical difficulties” and our connection date – which had gone from 10^th December to 10^th February was now 1^st April – which seems a date improbably plucked out of the air. The local newspaper Le Telegramme was a little more illuminating the next day: « Muzillac : L’internet à haut débit cafouille » (note to English readers ; cafouille = get into a mess).

My next possible source would be newspapers, I’ll return to French newspapers in the future but Ouest-France has a detailed forecast for today and then a single symbol for each of the next five days. As the area covered ranges from the south of the Loire to Cherbourg on the channel this is, at best, approximate and so understandably they tend to cover all options often using a black cloud with the sun peeking round it.

Radio forecasts are of erratic detail in the UK (and even BBC radio 4 seems to have abandoned the Channel Islands (Les Isles Anglo-Normandes) which would at least provide a forecast for somewhere within 200 kilometres of us). Radio France-Info has a regular forecast that’s clearly read by someone who practicing for a speed reading competition, good for my French listening skills but all of Bretagne is covered by a single rapidly delivered sentence (sometimes, even less helpfully, he (it’s always a he for some reason) simply refers to les prévisions pour l’ouest). The shipping forecast with its comforting slightly old-fashioned terms (“the general synopsis at 05:05 today ….”) gives a general view of weather patterns and we are 15km from a bit of sea that is in the Biscay shipping area – but Biscay extends 450km west and south of us so again that’s very general (and, usually in my experience, whatever weather we have Biscay is always “rain later”). I’ve even managed to find on France-Info the French version of the shipping forecast which starts at Viking ("Veekeeng"), ends at Irish Sea and has francophone versions of the channel areas (pas de Calais for Dover, côte d’abricot for Plymouth) and a whole new set of exotic sounding sea areas in the Mediterranean.

And then there’s TV; we have 135 English language channels on Freesat HD (128 of them unwatchable) but no access to French TV at present as the original plan was to get it delivered down the phone line with the internet service (see above). BBC TV forecasts are quite good and at least go into some detail but extracting useful information for us in southern Morbihan requires specific skills. At the start there’s an Atlantic weather chart which includes western France on the screen for about three seconds, then the UK maps frustratingly cut off just below the Brest peninsula so I have to try to work out if those showers along the north Brittany coast are part of a bigger weather pattern that includes us or simply local. Then, after the detailed UK regions, another extrapolation exercise from the weather for north Brittany, the Cotentin and Normandy to work out the possible future weather for us.

As a result, days like Thursday and Friday this week sometimes catch me out. As the southern UK (and north Brittany, the Cotentin and Normandy) laboured under heavy cloud cover and showers we enjoyed two glorious days with almost unbroken sunshine and a temperature of 14C. However, the weather system that brought the huge rainfall and strong winds last night was visible for two days in that three second bit at the start of the forecast ….