The first signs of turbulence appeared last Monday when a couple of perfectly innocent meteorologists were overheard discussing a large weather system forming in the Caribbean. By Tuesday, an area of low pressure at news desks developed and it was clear that a massive storm of hysteria was heading our way. By Wednesday, it had reached Category 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale when some guy whose best mate knew a journalist's brother got hold of the information, grasping little of it. By this time it had downgraded from category 5, real devastation in the Caribbean to uncut, grade A manufactured codswallop which was then cut to one part fact to ten parts untethered speculation and sold on for public consumption with predictable consequences.
This being the UK, the media were prophesying something of biblical proportions, and they may well have been right; it was, after all, largely untrue and grew in the telling with all real meaning being lost.
