Weather reports

We Brits are reputed to be obsessed with the weather. This expatriate is, for example, fascinated when Gulf News reports of torrential downpours in the supposedly arid Sandlands... streets in Abu Dhabi are mostly built without storm drainage since rain is so rare.

This winter here in Munich has been astonishingly mild; the high forecast for this third January day of 2014 is 9 degrees Celsius. I see that in 2009 I noted here that at Christmas we had already had a fortnight of temperatures failing to rise above freezing.

At the same time the United Kingdom has been buffeted by huge storms for the past two weeks, wreaking havoc and bringing with it flooding, power outages and fatalities.

On the other side of the ocean, as my readers are well aware, our girl is on holiday in Washington DC. To her delight she learned of a surprise Christmas present... a visit to New York for a few days. She looked forward to romantic explorations of Soho and the Village. They left Washington by bus yesterday morning.

However today residents of and visitors to the Big Apple are being advised to stay indoors, and shelter from a predicted repeat of Snowmageddon. Needless to say Auld Da in Munich will be following the live ticker in the coming hours.