The weather is a staple of casual conversation in Milltown. This isn’t the city, where people pass on the street without a word or a nod. In a small town, with everyone knowing each other, a chance meeting demands a response. But we still don’t have the time to stand around and gossip. Not all of us, anyway. So what’s needed is a simple, formulaic exchange that allows us to inquire briefly about one another’s welfare, and then move on.

So the reply to the question "How are things?" is "Fine, thanks", or "Mustn’t grumble", or, at a pinch, "This cold snap’s playing havoc with my arthritis". The question is rhetorical. The shorter the answer, the better; there’s no need for a long list of seasonal ailments. So a glaringly obvious remark about the weather is a better way to achieve conversational closure.

But, my, how things have changed. Just when we thought we’d got Mother Nature under control and walking to heel, she starts fighting back. And not just with a nip on the ankle, either; we’re getting a comprehensive savaging. We watch - with a mixture of awe and astonishment - as our weather takes an apocalyptic turn.

We used to tune into the weather forecast if we were planning a day out, and the farmers would pay particular attention at hay time. But the weather never dominated our lives in the way it does today. Now we huddle round the radio, like folk did in the war, to hear news from the front. We listen intently to the forecasts, even though a lot of them seem like guesswork. After all, isn’t "A 50% chance of rain" just a fancy way of saying "We haven't the foggiest"? It doesn’t answer the burning question: do we need to take an umbrella?

The prophets of doom talk about climate change. Here in the South Pennines we were surprised to have a climate at all; we thought we just had weather. But even the experts can’t agree about what the future holds. A few years back, after a spate of especially cold winters, the climatologists insisted we were heading towards another Ice Age. That chilly prognosis has been conveniently forgotten; now it’s global warming that’s all the rage.

We used to have rain; now we have storms. We used to have wind; now, bizarrely, we have twisters and tornadoes. We used to have dry spells; now we have droughts that empty reservoirs and transform green lawns into tawny tundra. If there’s a pattern to our weather, then we haven’t detected it. All bets are off. Anything can happen now. Anytime. It’s bewildering.

Over the years, the weather has been kind to Old Ted. Long retired, he props up the bar at his local, regaling our more gullible visitors with tall tales of weird weather phenomena - culled from memory, his overactive imagination or the pages of Old Moore’s Almanac. He remembers a traveller who, having got lost one night during a particularly savage blizzard, tied up his horse to what he assumed was a hitching-post. Next morning, when the the snow had melted, he found his horse hanging from the church steeple. Incredible... Whirlwinds would regularly pick up chicken coops, cars - even houses - and deposit them miles away, without a scratch. Amazing... If the visitors offer to buy Ted a drink ("I’ll have a pint of the strong stuff. And a whisky chaser. And one of those slim panatella cigars. Cheers"), where’s the harm in that?

Now, though, we get weird weather all the time, and Ted’s stories don’t draw the crowds like they used to. Visitors steal his thunder with experiences of their own: "What a coincidence. The very same thing happened to us. Just half an hour ago". Ted now cuts a forlorn figure, harassing visitors with his irrelevant observations. If he says "Aren’t these fine buttocks for an old man?" one more time, the landlord is going to have to throw him out.