"Will your grace command me any service to the world's end?" asks the obliging Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, a play that strikes the casual reader as being precisely that.
"I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes," she adds, and then presents Don Pedro with a list of politically incorrect suggestions as to what precisely such an errand might entail.
If Beatrice were to head for the Antipodes just now, she would encounter a southern summer only just beginning. And this reversal of the seasons is not the only weather difference she would find.
Here in the north, for example, the smooth, westerly flow of air around the world is disrupted by a number of large mountain ranges - notably the Rockies, the Himalayas and the Alps. They cause the streaming atmosphere aloft to undulate and this, in turn, results in more disturbed conditions near the ground.
There are no comparable barriers south of the Equator, so the air circumnavigates the world in a much more orderly and smoother way. This results in a band of surprisingly persistent winds which run like a ribbon around the globe from west to east. Beatrice would have to cross the "Roaring Forties".
There are other Antipodean peculiarities which might seem strange to us up here. For example, although Australia looks perfectly normal on the weather map, all its weather systems are upside-down and back-to-front.
Buys Ballot's law as it applies in the Northern Hemisphere states that if you stand with your back to the wind, the low pressure is to your left. This, translated to the weather map, means that the wind blows in an anti-clockwise direction around centres of low pressure and clockwise around an anticyclone.
In the Southern Hemisphere, however, everything is reversed; the winds blow clock- wise around depressions and anti-clockwise around the areas of high pressure.
For this reason, some would assert that if Beatrice were to have a bath in the Antipodes, she would afterwards see the water drain clockwise from the tub - rather than anti-clockwise as it is claimed to do up here.
But this is something of a myth. The Coriolis effect, which dictates the direction of the wind around a low, holds good for water just as much as air, but it is only effective for large-scale movements of the fluid.
The scale of the activity in Beatrice's bath can be assumed to be such that the Coriolis effect is very tiny and insignificant compared to pre-existing eddies in the water, the interfering geometry of the tub and, indeed, the sloshing about of Beatrice herself.