`Having been so lucky as to have had a mostly very happy and fulfilling life, in which moreover the greatest stresses I have had to bear came in the earlier years, I have felt impelled to write this account at least partly as a thanks offering for my good fortune."
Thus begins a jaunty, cheery little book entitled Through All the Changing Sciences of Life: A Meteorologist's Tale. It is the autobiography of the late Hubert Lamb, and I can recommended it heartily.
Hubert Horace Lamb was the foremost climatologist of his generation. His first major contribution to the science was in 1950, when he devised what was to become the "Lamb Weather Type" classification, still widely used.
His most enduring legacy, however, has been in the history of climate. Before Lamb's time, climate was thought of as a relatively constant feature of a given region; it was he who, almost single-handedly, first alerted the world to the inconstant, fickle nature of our global climate.
This is not a treatise on climatology, though. It is a personal memoir of a love affair with weather and a jolly account of the people and places Lamb encountered on his odyssey.
It began in 1939, when Lamb, then in his 20s, was one of a number of meteorologists from Britain who had been lent, as it were, to the fledgling Irish Meteorological Service to get it under way. He describes in graphic detail the stresses of forecasting for the transatlantic flying boats at Foynes, but also the compensations he enjoyed, like canoeing, sailing and several expeditions to the top of Carrantouhill, which he describes ingenuously as "the highest hill in Ireland".
The weather, naturally, runs like a silver thread through the book. Of Christmas 1939 in Co Limerick, for example, he writes: "Tinsel-like sparkling white ice crystals grew an inch or more long on all the windward side branches of the pine trees, and in early January, the ice was so thick that one could drive cars across it."
Lamb frequently displays the endearing, benign eccentricity which is characteristic of the archetypal meteorologist. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final chapter which is, oddly, a discourse on the lamentable decline in the purity of the English language. For all his skills, Lamb is an evocative but not a stylish writer, and it is ironic that this section contains more grammatical errors than any other in the book - and all have quite a few.
Take A Meteorologist's Tale in the spirit in which you find it offered to you - it is the story of a happy man.