Bad Air

Well, this air pollution is a rum do. I knew something was up when I noticed how many cars in London were coated in a thin layer of sand, blown in from the Sahara - but there's also, we are assured, a sky-high level of various industrial pollutants in the air over most of southern England. Indeed the highest levels have been reached in, of all places, North Norfolk, where the whelk and the Appleyard play. When the air pollution story topped the news this morning, with official advice to those with chest or heart problems not to overdo it, I didn't take much notice - until I set out for work and discovered that the air is indeed in a bad way. It seemed to take that much more effort to breathe it in, and I arrived at NigeCorp with stinging eyes and sore throat, feeling very far from chipper. It's not like the London smogs of yesteryear, but it's still pretty unpleasant. No doubt it's all down to climate change.
 Talking of which, the Met Office has added yet more computing power to its whizzy supercomputers and is promising that its long-term forecasts will eventually achieve 80 per cent accuracy, a massive improvement on the usual lamentable performance. That's right, the Met is forecasting that this will happen, in the long term... Meanwhile, businesses that need to know are ignoring the Met Office and relying on commercial forecasters, who might not have the Met's mighty computer power but somehow tend to get it right.