Chesil View

My first interest in weather and in particular heavy snowfall saw sparked by two things. Firstly my great grand mother telling me as a young boy about her experiences as a young girl in the great victorian  blizzards of January1881 and March 1891 and secondly by my own vague experiences of the winter of 1963. I remember my late father standing me as a toddler on the windowsill of our front room at our home in Bournemouth and saying take a good look Mark because you may never see it like this again. ( Luckily for me he was wrong  because I was 18 when the great blizzard of Feb 18/19TH 1978 came along and the snow was even deeper.

My general interest in weather was further built by the summer of 1976 when I started wrk as an apprentoce thatcher. A great job to have if you are interested in the weather.

Then of course came the above mentioned great Blizzard of 1978. By far and away the greatest weather event of my life. Living by now in the Purbeck hills just west of Swanage we were snowin by 20 foot drifts for seven days and there was still snow from thoses drifts on the ground at the start of April.

In my mid thirties I became acquainted with Ian Currie, author of the county weather book series after reading his Hampshire weather book and I wrote to him suggesting he do a Dorset weather book he very kindly took the time to reply saying that if I did the research he would publish it and so I became a co -author of The Dorset weather book in 1997.

Publicity for the book required that I do some local radio interviews and during one I was asked put on the spot and askedto give a forecast for the coming winter. I declined to do so but did say ( having seen some models on the internet) that despite the then mild weather that I expected it to turn cold and snowy by the following wednesday ( talk about a hostage to fortune) the following wednesday however the snow arrived and I was duly hailed on the local local radio station. Talk about a spot of luck.lol.

In 1997 I was also asked by the local Bournemout echo newspaper to write a weekly weather column which I did without fail for various papers in the regional Echo series from sept 1997 until April 2017. Not a bad run for an amateur. In that same period I have given talks about, Dorset weather, wicked winters and the Blizzard of 78 to many local groups.

I have also had the good fortune to appear on various TV channels in that period occasionally doing live links to breakfast programmes and the like, although my favourite was being interviewed by the late Ian Macaskill on the Essential weather guide. He was a really lovely guy.

In 2008 the thirtieth anniversary of the Blizzard of 78 spurred book writing juices again and I started a year long oddysey that end up with me publishing The Blizzard of 78, The snowstorm that buried Dorset with 100 previously unseen photographs and telling the story of that amazing week.

I have been a member of the Netweather and TWO forums since about 2000 formerly posting as MCWEATHER and Broadmayne Blizzard.

My interest in weather and snowfall in particular has not waned one iota in fact I,m probably more interetsed now than ever.

Thanks for looking in and happy weather watching.