Katrina

As I watch the television pictures of hurricane Katrina battering the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, it becomes very clear that the geographers are right to call Britain's climate temperate. One can live in England for decades and never see a storm like this.

The scale of the thing is hard to comprehend. Satellite pictures show its extent, filling the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico with a whirlpool of ragged cloud, ever-tightening towards the center. And there the circular eye of the hurricane peers back at us as the weather people try to contain their excitement at such a perfect storm, reminding themselves of just how much damage and loss of life it will cause. The whole system is immense, stretching from the west coast of Florida all the way to the Louisiana/Texas border; one could lose several Britains inside it.

And now, as the eye makes landfall and moves northwards just east of New Orleans, out go the reporters to give us an idea of what it is like to stand within a hurricane. As they try to speak coherently while battered by those winds and assaulted by the deluge, one thinks of the cameraman too, also out there in the maelstrom, suffering for his art. Why do they do it?

Of course, the answer is thee and me; they know we want to sit at ease in our armchairs and see just how bad it can get. To show pictures of palm trees being bent and torn, water rushing past in a river where once there was a road, is never as dramatic on film as in reality. We need some poor human to give the thing scale, to be an example of the actual experience. Only then can we get some idea of what it is like.

Brave men. We might carp at them for bias and selection but, when the chips are down, they are the ones who get out there in the storm and duck down into the trenches of war. And all so that we might see what it's like without risking our comfortable lives.

Sure, I can be cynical with the best of them and say that these are the foot soldiers of the media, that the real opinion-makers are their bosses, the ones who sit in state in the calm of the studios. But their time will come and one day they will sit in safety while asking stupid questions of a new bunch of young hopefuls out there in the wind and the rain.

Give them their due. It takes courage to be in situations that all others have fled, purely so that the public can have their experience by proxy.

I know what excitement a storm can be. In central Kansas I stood and watched the rain fall sideways as a tornado crashed through a small town not ten miles away. Very easily I could be one of those crazy tornado-chasers, taking photographs of the monster as it rips its way through the countryside, scrambling for the car when it changes course and heads directly for me.

But being close to something like that is not the same as being within it. I am not so stupid as to imagine that the excitement would last long if actually caught by one. They are killers, just as the hurricanes of the Gulf are.

Sometimes it seems that there is no part of this country that does not have huge weather. Hurricanes and tornadoes in the south and west, floods in the Mississippi valley, blizzards and ice storms in the north, and drought and forest fires in the far west. It doesn't matter where you are in America, mother nature will have a go at killing you.

And I think back to my countrymen in their little island off the coast of Europe and how they gripe and complain at a little drizzle or a heat wave that touches 90ºF. Man, they don't know what real weather is!