An idiosyncrasy one develops as the author of a daily weather column is to view any significant event, at home or abroad, from the point of view of its connection with the weather.
And thus it was with the beatifications in St Peter's Square last Sunday. Was there ever a meteorologist, I asked myself, of a stature to compare with Pio Nono?
Of course, there wasn't. Pius, we learned, succeeded in effecting the proclamation of his own infallibility, and no weather person has ever established public confidence on such a scale.
Even when making solemn proclamations to the world on matters solely concerned with meteorology or climate, meteorologists are never deemed to be immune from error.
But another of Pius IX's achievements, the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, has its counterpart in meteorology. In 1895 the president of the Royal Meteorological Society in London, one Richard Inwards, delivered a lecture entitled "Fallacies Connected with the Weather" - in effect, a Syllabus of Weather Errors. Among those he mentioned were the following:
That there is a connection between the weather of any day in the week or year, and that of any other period. . As examples of this kind of error he quotes popular sayings like "Fine on Friday, fine on Sunday", and beliefs that the weather at, say, Candlemas, or on St Swithin's Day, may have a bearing on conditions for succeeding weeks.
That animals are reliable forecasters of weather. Here he provides a litany of purported animal signs of rain or sunshine, like "bats flying about in the evening, many snails in evidence, fish rising in the lake, bees busy, cattle restless, flies and gnats troublesome, crows congregating and clamouring, spiders' webs thickly woven in the grass, and ducks and geese making more than usual noise". They shall be anathema, says Mr Inwards. And finally:
To suppose that there is any such thing as a weather prophet. By this, of course, he does not mean your friendly TV weather forecaster, but rather Old Moore and his colleagues who "sometimes for pelf, at other times for honour and glory, profess to be able to predict the weather for any future date". Such an individual, says Mr Inwards, "must have an inventive mind, a store of self-confidence and insensibility to ridicule, and above all a keen memory for his successes and a prompt forgetfulness of all his failures." Like meteorologists, you might think.