Meteorology, as I have often said, can take one to exciting places. Last week, for instance, it brought me to the Riviera, to Cannes and Nice and Monte Carlo, there to view the latest Meteosat to which the final touches are being put before its launch next year.
O for a beaker full of the warm South!, I hear you sigh. Dance and Provencal song and sun-burnt mirth! But, pace Keats, it was not like that at all. My first night was spent in a stationary car on a frozen auto-route, with the temperature at minus 2C and the snow 15 in deep and rising.
You may have noticed on the weather maps last week that a large low-pressure area covered most of western Europe, channelling a stream of freezing Arctic air from northern Russia to a point directly over central France. Into this low I ventured with my car, and just as predicted by the Cassandras left behind the snow began a little south of Lyon.
Thicker it got, and thicker still, until the traffic slithered to a halt; and thus began a 12-hour vigil during which I could observe and feel the idiosyncrasies of snow in all its forms in sufficient detail to fill a thousand Weather Eyes.
They dug us out at five the morning after. Retreating at first a dozen miles or so, we resumed our journey southwards by a route that was less challenging, and in due course reached our destination. And how nice it was! The temperature was a balmy 12C, and the sky, completely cloudless, conspired with the Mediterranean's blue to justify the region's name, the Cote d'Azur.
But why this expedition in the first place? Beside the beach in Cannes is the factory of Alcatel, where is assembled a weather satellite which when launched next year will be known as MSG1. It will be the first of the Meteosat Second Generation series of geo-stationary weather satellites to replace the present Meteosats that now provide the nightly pictures seen on television.
MSG1 will record an image of Africa and Europe and surrounding oceans every 15 minutes, instead of the current Meteosat-7's every 30 minutes.
It will distinguish the various elements of the weather much more clearly than the current spacecraft and provide a wealth of extra data for those whose task it is to monitor the global climate. It seemed a good idea for some of us involved to go and see the assembled spacecraft before it disappears for ever to fulfil its celestial destiny as an eye in the sky 23,000 miles above our heads.