The winds of change... Photo: Susanne Nilsson / flickr CC.
Eye - 11 December 2015
From watching the weather to falling off your bike
Watching the weather
The last century has seen the start of rapid climate change.
Eye wonders how many changes Oliver Ashford has observed in his years of weather watching.
Oliver, former clerk of Geneva Meeting and currently worshipping at Wallingford Meeting, celebrated his hundredth birthday on 1 October.
He has been a weather enthusiast since childhood and twenty-five of those years were spent at the World Meterological Organisation (WMO). During this period staff expanded from thirty-five to about 300.
Oliver began as chief of the investigations section and ended up as director for programme planning – helping to develop what ultimately became the World Climate Programme.
In an article published by the Royal Meterological Society in 2008, he reflected: ‘Looking back on the thirty years since my retirement from WMO, my twenty-five years in the WMO Secretariat, my fifteen years in the Met Office and my three years at Bootham [Quaker School], I can see that both weather and meteorology have indeed helped to mould my life. May they continue to do so for what remains. After that, the forecast may simply be “probably warmer”!’
This is a forecast the WMO clearly agrees with, as the theme for World Meterological Day, on 23 March 2016, is ‘Hotter, drier, wetter – Face the future’.
An ideal place to fall off your bike
A two-wheeled catastrophe at the junction of Blyburgate and Peddars Lane in Beccles elicited a moving level of care and consideration from the local community.
Jill Allum, of Beccles Meeting, was prompted to wonder: ‘Are we too reticent about telling our stories? I don’t have to say I’m a Quaker, I’ve lived here twenty years, seventeen of them as Friends Meeting House warden… my bike catastrophe was rather public but I chose to write the following letter, which was printed in the local paper, the Beccles and Bungay Journal: “I would like to thank all the incredibly kind people who helped me when I fell off my bike on Monday, November 9. I landed at the feet of a care assistant waiting to cross the road, who was love itself. A mother with a pushchair brought a first aid kit to plaster my blood-pouring eyebrow. A police car stopped and the policeman got out his blue box with gloves and more plasters. All this happened immediately I fell.
“Then the policeman drove me to Beccles Hospital and took me to the receptionist. The care assistant wheeled my bike to the Hospital and would not leave me until I’d been seen to. Within twenty minutes of falling I was being dealt with. Finally a kind person volunteered to take my bike home in her car and the receptionist phoned for a taxi for me. I could not have felt more cared for. Beccles is the ideal place to fall off your bike, as the town has such a tremendous community spirit!”’
Jill found that her letter struck a chord, with one person remarking ‘The art of letter writing isn’t dead. You wrote a really nice letter in the paper, everybody doing their bit, just how it should be. Well done!’
