THERE is something sublimely comical about simply living in Britain these days. For example, wondering in an idle moment what the Meteorological Office is for. I did think it was to do with their having hugely expensive computers so that they can tell us accurately what the weather will be. But that can’t be what the Met Office exists for, because they make such a habit of getting it wrong. Remember the other year the promised “barbecue summer” when we all shivered in the wind and the rain? Or the drought and accompanying hosepipe ban when it proceeded to pour so unrelentingly that folk were caught trying to build an ark?

When I was a lad, my grandad used to ask me to bring him back a piece of seaweed if I happened to go to Scarborough. His weather forecasting from that modest clump of vegetation was better than anything by the Met men.

But back to the comedy. We’ve just endured the coldest most miserable, freezing or dripping, nine months I can remember. Last week, that unidentified flying object, the sun, came out and the Met Office began to tell us it might kill us.

They are now obliged to give us “heatwave warnings”. Yorkshire and the Humber was said to have a 90 per cent chance of a heatwave between noon on Friday and Sunday night.

Met Office officials warned of “significant”

health effects for specific “vulnerable groups.” What are these “significant” health effects? Perhaps they involve us in nice little treats like taking our shirts off and eating ice cream? They did advise us to “drink plenty of fluids,” which I didn’t find very helpful.

Have you ever tried drinking plenty of solids?

Then it all starts to get hugely technical, bureaucratic and piled high with jargon. For instance: “Yorkshire and the Humber has been placed in the heatwave action category, level three of four used.”

I’ll tell you what: if we have another week of this, there’ll be a hosepipe ban. And if we’re lucky enough to bask in the overdue sunshine for another three weeks, they’ll be telling us – as they did in the droughts of 1976, 1993 and 2003 – that “the ground will not recover its water levels for years, if ever”.

Naturally, that was the cue for the rain gods to prove they knew better, and we suffered a plague of floods.

Some of this national comedy is a very black joke. I refer particularly to the longrunning farce concerning global warming or, as we are now commanded to call it, climate change.

This is the great bogeyman with which the Greens, the BBC, assorted Luddites, primitives and dinosaurs who promise us darkness and everlasting chill threaten us with when the windmills fail to deliver.

Global warming is a demonstrable sham, a torrent of lies and fraud often perpetrated by those who are doing very nicely out of those windmills. The statistics about the predicted rise in temperature have been fiddled for years. And even the Government and the BBC now have to admit the glaring fact that for the past 12 years temperatures have either stayed the same or decreased while the dreaded carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have gone up.

Carbon dioxide is usually good for us. It’s necessary to life itself. But the biggest joke of all is the record of the Met Office which can’t get the forecast right for a week on Tuesday but gives us solemn warnings about what’s going to happen to our weather over the next 100 years.