Here Today, Gonu Tomorrow

I suppose blogging about the weather is the lowest you can go, but Cyclone Gonu has certainly been a change from the usual round of blue sky, sun sea and sand: most of the sand right now is up in the air, suspended in a fine soupy suspension. Neat alliteration, I know.

The easiest job in Dubai must be weatherman. 363 days of the year it's a case of waking up and just hitting the 'sunny tomorrow' button. The other two days it's the 'light showers possible' button. Doddle. Given that the last major tropical cyclone to hit the peninsula was in 1890 (killing 700 in Oman, apparently), they don't get to play with weather like this very often.

But try and predict what's going to happen over the weekend and you can see just how random weathermen can be. A quick skip around the world's weather sites has weather.com predicting storms Thursday and big black nastiness Friday. Meanwhile the BBC thinks that Thursday in Dubai will be sunny and visibility will be good (not from where I'm sitting, pal: it's grey, murky and disgusting) and pressure will be 1000mb (my car says 992 and my car's smarter than you).

Typical of a Brit weatherman to get it quite so wrong.

CNN is hard to read: there are so many dolt-friendly icons and so much big friendly text around that you don't actually get any useful information, but it would appear that we can expect a sort of spiky egg yolk with some cotton wool, with more cotton wool tomorrow than today. At least you can get CNN Weather online without having to put up with that mad dwarf that keeps leaping in front of the map, gibbering and barking like a peyote-crazed shaman and then disappearing as suddenly as she materialised.

So it's back to Dubai, then, and an apology for those masters of the millibar, the Dubai Met Office. I take it back. They're the best of the whole bad lot. Here is how our weekend's going to look according to the home team:

RATHER HOT IN GENERAL & HAZY/DUSTY WITH FRESH WINDS MAY REACH GALE AT TIMES, & LOW/ TOWERING CLOUDS OVER EASTERN & NORTHERN AREAS MAY BE THUNDERY/RAINY. MODERATE - FRESH NE - SE_LY WIND WITH MODERATE - ROUGH SEA IN ARABIAN GULF 3 - 5/6 FT OFFSHORE, AND ROUGH - VERY ROUGH IN OMAN GULF 8 - 10 FT OFFSHORE.

Lovely!