THE ailing Mr Chips, as I recall, overhearing remarks about his lack of progeny, protested that "I have hundreds of children! - and they are all boys".
"Weather Eye", by analogy, has many, many friends that its writer will never have the privilege of meeting. One such was Basil Clancy, who passed away last week, and I had no idea he was such a well known person to me he was a kindly reader of this column who, several years ago, wrote to draw my attention to a little gem of literary meteorology penned by Patrick Kavanagh.
With the development of the computer in the 1950s, it seemed to meteorologists that, given a sufficient number of accurate observations and computers big enough to do the calculations, accurate weather forecasts for weeks or even months ahead were a very reasonable ambition. But it was not to be. Their optimism was shattered in the early 1960s by an American mathematician called Edward Lorenz, who articulated the "Chaos Theory".
Lorenz's thesis, as applied to meteorology, was that, beyond a certain interval of time, the behaviour of the atmosphere becomes inherently unpredictable.
No matter how well the computer models reflect ifs actual behaviour the initial state of the atmosphere can never be defined accurately enough for them to work effectively for, say, a three week forecast period. Even the tiniest eddies in the wind flow may amplify spontaneously over time and will, in due course, achieve proportions sufficient to have a catalytic effect on major weather systems. Or, as Lorenz famously put it: "The flap of a butterfly's swings over Brazil may spawn the next tornado up in Texas."
Basil Clancy pointed out that Patrick Kavanagh, writing in 1952, had anticipated this "butterfly effect" - in reverse!
It is summer and the eerie beat
Of madness in Europe trembles the
Wings of the butterflies along the canal.
But Basil Clancy was a poet himself and he included with his letter to me lines entitled Cosmos that he had written in 1989. They exploit the Lorenz motif even more effectively than Kavanagh's, going, in part:
A storm that threatened
New York's highest towers
Was caused by a butterfly's wing
Fluttering in Peking.
"Weather Eye", alas, will have no further help from Basil Clancy: Anno domini, as Mr Chips observed another time, "that's the more final complaint of all in the end".