As If

Why? I asked myself last night, as I trudged home from work through the cold, gloom and drizzle - Why do I always fall for it? 'It' being, of course, what the Met Office whimsically calls the Weather Forecast. For two days running, the Met Office projection of a fine, warm, dry day had been mugged by soggy reality - and these two days were but two more to add to the year's tottering pile of wrong 'forecasts'. And it's not as if I even believe these products of the Met Office's whizzy banks of warmist-friendly supercomputers; I know they are more than likely useless, and yet I religiously, or rather addictively, follow them, a fool returning to his folly - and, what's worse, I act as if they are thoroughly reliable.
 What is going on? Am I falling for the drama of it all, with those twinkly, unabashed presenters and their CGI maps and satellite images and their talk of 'pulses' of rain and cloud 'bubbling up'? They have the air of reassuring omniscience of old-time family doctors - every bit as plausible, and every bit as unreliable. And of course I know this, but there I am, every night and morning, hanging on their words, even as my better judgment tugs my sleeve and warns me to take them with a bushel or two of salt. Perhaps it's a case of 'As If' thinking, as advocated in some quarters - as in: we 'know' there's no such thing as free will but we can behave 'as if' there is, or we 'know' there's no God, or no meaning to life, etc... Wait a minute - weren't we talking about the weather?
 The good thing was that the day actually started as per forecast (and even this isn't always so - the 'forecast' sometimes contradicts what the 'forecaster' could see by looking out of the window). It was warm and sunny enough for two Marbled Whites to be flying on that trackside edgeland my train passes every morning. A heart-lifting consolation on my way back to work after two weeks of freedom.