Nick on Weather

There is a woman who lives a few doors down from me in Oxford. I don't know her very well but we always exchange greetings when we pass in the street. She is usually out walking her small dog and her cheery hello is followed on every occasion by a comment about the weather: 'Colder today' or 'It looks like it's brightening up' or 'They say there's more rain on the way.' Or whatever.

There is always something to say about the weather in this country. This is partly to do with the changeability we experience – often day to day, occasionally hour by hour – in what is going on all around us. The weather is also a safe topic, uncontroversial; anyone and everyone can have an opinion about it. And I am no exception.

My interest is professional as well as personal. I am a geographer. The raw material of nature and the relationships people have developed with the physical world have long been the focus of my subject. And if there's one thing I've learned from my years of teaching, researching and writing about geography, it is the simple fact that you have to get out there and experience nature to appreciate fully all its wonders, as well as its dangers.

During my travels, writing and making television documentaries, I've come across some pretty intense weather situations – great rolling banks of fog on the coast of Chile in South America; a choking dust storm in Kazakhstan, Central Asia; constant, almost unbearable 98% humidity in the swamps of New Guinea.

I even made a series of journeys to the world's hottest, coldest, wettest and driest inhabited places, going to extremes in search of weather conditions. The weather in those spots is more severe than anything we face in Britain, but that's not to say that we don't have to deal with hazardous climatic conditions here – try asking a person whose home has been flooded, or someone who has survived being struck by lightning.

Our weather can be fascinating, beautiful, bizarre and dangerous. A long day of drizzle can certainly be tedious, but rarely is Britain's weather described as boring. This is part of the reason why it has become such a national obsession. Our interest in the weather has seeped into our language and practically become a part of our culture. Let's face it, we all know about clouds with silver linings and storms in teacups, whether we feel as right as rain or a bit under the weather.