Tomorrow it will be mainly, or then again not.

Ten days ago, I read this at the Daily Telegraph: ‘Cold snap to last a month says Meteorological Office’. It lasted precisely four and a half days, after which we had the hottest six days in May since 1940.

Last Saturday morning, my local forecast told me the hot spell would end that night with torrential rain. It continued dry and warm. On Sunday morning came the same prediction, followed by another 15 hours of sun…towards the end of which, the Met Office had the audacity to tell me it was already raining in the very garden where I was getting a tan under a clear blue sky.

Now tonight (Monday) the forecast for tomorrow tells me it has been raining all day: it’s been non-stop sunny. It says tomorrow will be partly cloudy. Why the blue bloody blazes should I have any faith in that version of the future?

The Met Office says – prepare to vomit – that it ‘provides world-class value-added weather and climate related services to a broad range of customers in both the public and private sector.’

Aaaaarrrgg: there’s that ‘world-class’ bollocks again.  And I don’t want value bloody added bloody weather, I just want to know what it’s going to be. That’s all.

The Met Office got the summer of 2010 – “the barbecue summer” – completely wrong. It got the winter of 2010/11 – “unusually mild” – completely wrong.

And it costs us £170 million per annum. That’s £550,000 per forecast.

There are about 2,000 sites you can go to right now showing exact wind speeds, cloud formations and rain expectation using infra-red satellite images that won’t even cost you 55p. You can – I know, because I’ve done it umpteen times – work out what will happen and more or less when (+ or – 15%) each and every day of the year…without going any where near the Met Office.

So isn’t this a hundred and seventy million quid we can safely put towards something more useful like solar-powered pith helmets for Whitehall mandarins, or sanity lessons for Ed Balls?

I think so. Oh yes, I do, I really do.