The Met Office has issued a yellow warning for rain covering Swindon, beginning Friday 23 October with a 95 per cent chance of precipitation through the early hours. Temperatures are expected to sit around 12C, though it will feel closer to 10C, with gusts reaching 49mph throughout the day.
The rain is forecast to ease slightly by early afternoon before clearing completely by 6pm, only to return with 95 per cent certainty on Saturday, drop away on Sunday, and start up again on Monday. Separately, Thames Water repairs are expected to cause disruption on nine roads in north Swindon this week, which forecasters have not ruled out making the puddles more interesting.
What has struck residents is not the rain itself, which Swindon receives with some regularity, but the confidence of the figures attached to it. A 95 per cent chance of rain is, as one council spokesperson put it, effectively a certainty dressed up to sound like a choice.
By Friday afternoon the chance of rain will have dropped to a mere 80 per cent, a figure the council has asked residents not to interpret as good news, good weather, or indeed a council achievement of any kind.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had never once needed a percentage to tell her it was raining. 'In my day you looked out the window,' she said. 'If it was wet, you took your coat. Nobody asked the sky for its odds.' She was similarly unconvinced by the concept of a temperature that 'feels like' something colder than it actually is. 'That's not weather,' she said. 'That's just somebody at the Met Office having a bad day and taking it out on the rest of us.'
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the warning had given him a new way of describing his firm's recent decision to relocate the stationery delivery van's usual Friday round to Thursday, on account of forecasted conditions. 'We're calling it proactive weather resilience,' he said. 'Julie wanted to call it moving the van, but I said that undersells it.' He added that he had considered launching a limited edition range of branded umbrellas, though admitted the prototype, assembled from leftover ring binders, had not performed well in testing.
By Sunday the rain is expected to clear entirely, with sunny intervals and gusts dropping to a comparatively restrained 39mph, a development the Met Office described as significant and most residents described as Sunday.
Monday will bring more rain, with gusts returning to around 40mph, which meteorologists say is consistent with the wind simply going round the block and coming back for another go.