"Will Hand" wrote Why do people always seem to hype up the weather
nowadays? LARGE SNIP
Modern weather is really very benign most of the time (as it often was in
the
past if we are honest), and then all of a sudden you get a Boscastle. This
fog
is just run of the mill ordinary winter stuff. The main problem is that
Heathrow
is operating at 98% capacity and hence cannot cope with any interruptions.

I was off work yesterday and I noticed one of the BBC weather presenters was
asked about the fog. He said that the problem was that "the large amount of
moisture from the heavy rainfall over the past few weeks was now *coming out
of the ground* and was causing the problem.........."

Well .... that, as an oversimplification, ranks with my late grannie's
explanation of a "cloudburst", bless her, ("the clouds tear and it all comes
down at once"). Later on in the day, another (general news) presenter at
Heathrow said: "The weather front that brought all this fog has not moved
away as quickly as expected".

I try not to be too het-up about these things but news correspondents do
need a good kick up the whatsits, sometimes. In my own field of
Environmental Health, the ususal image shown in the aftermath of a large and
often fatal food poisoning outbreak - I'm thinking of one some years ago at
a large NHS hospital - is to show workers busy with gallons of bleach,
paying extra attention to pouring it, wholesale, down WC bowls. They have
no idea and don't seem to want to know the REAL reasons behind an outbreak,
but they cause us untold problems in educating food handlers later on.

To a group of catering workers, who were aghast that I *didn't* agree with
their thrice-daily bleaching of their loos and fanatical scrubbing of the
kitchen floors, at the expense of almost everything else, I had to say: "Why
do you need the floor to be clinically clean - isn't it instinctive that any
food that drops on the floor should immediately go in the bin" and "what are
you proposing to do in the WC that requires it to be sterile - and only then
until it's next used"? Meanwhile, their temperature control was
non-existent and the organisation of foodstuffs in their fridges and stock
control was bordering on lethal.

Rant over - but it has prepared me for some late (and only) Xmas shopping
this afternoon, conveniently round the corner from here - in Oxford Street!

Have a good Christmas and New Year.

Regards,

- Tom.