Colm O'Regan: 'My inner forecast finally feels seen'
Colm O'Regan: "The humble round barometer with the pale yellow face and ships wheel frame has been on the wall of the hall for as long as I can remember." Picture: Chani Anderson.
Stormy - Rain - Change - Fair - Very Dry. Does that sequence of words ring a bell? “Pressure? Pressure is for tyres” goes the old saying.
Well, far be it from me to correct old sayings, but pressure is for barometers and I’m here to say: Let’s bring back tapping the glass.
“The glass is going back”. It was my mother’s habit to tap the barometer every morning and announce which way the weather was going.
From a technical point of view, the light tap overcame any friction that would stop the needle from moving if the weather was changing slowly.
The glass was gone “way back” when “fierce bad weather” was on the way. The glass was up when things were improving. There are numbers on it and the descriptive words: Stormy, Rain, Change, Fair Very Dry. (By the way, Gerry Diffney, if you’re reading, “S R C F _ _ ?” could be question for the annual Holly Bough quiz.)
The humble round barometer with the pale yellow face and ships wheel frame has been on the wall of the hall for as long as I can remember. I tapped it a few times in the autumn and on a stormy day it was showing Very Dry so I knew then it wasn’t working.
My wife bought me a barometer for Christmas. See?! Men are NOT hard to buy for. All we want are weather forecasting devices and wives who notice our melancholy tapping.
This one doesn’t have SRCFVD. It’s a bit cooler and more minimalist, just an arrow to the left saying Deterioration and one to the right saying Improvement. And that’s just life really isn’t it? We don’t really focus on how things are. Just are things getting better or worse.
I bought a thermometer as well to go with it, like salt and pepper. This thermometer looks and feels as cheap as chips. I don’t know how good it is. It probably knows when it’s freezing and boiling but I don’t trust the in between too much.
It doesn’t have the pleasing solidity of the Tolni thermometer that we grew up with. I know that one is an old thermometer because it was Made In England. And they stopped making small household items in England by law in 1997.
But cheap or not, it’s pleasing to have a method of telling the temperature and air pressure that is not dependent on Russian subs not cutting the internet cables. I feel bad asking Alexa to burn a load of diesel at the AI data centre to tell me what the temperature is, even though I could just go outside and see how the tip of my nose felt.
We should be more pressure aware anyway. Air pressure affects every single fluid in the body and pressure changes can give you the gyp in migraines or sinuses or arthritis. You’d imagine that’s how animals know weather in advance.
All the birds with their sensitive little ears that can detect all sorts of pressure changes and are a step ahead of the rest of us and skedaddle from the typhoon while we are too busy to notice.
I’ve reengaged with the weather forecast now. Hecto-pascals mean more to me. Falling Slowly is not an Oscar-wnning song, it’s the current situation at Mizen Head and Carnsore Point.
Round about the time I noticed the glass had stopped working, my mother began her own journey of reducing pressure forever and one day just before Christmas 2024 the glass went back and didn’t stir again. But now every time I tap the new one I feel like I’m carrying on her job.
