Could the UK be in for a BBQ summer this year? Summer 2010 looks set to be warmer than average and have good spells of sunshine, according to Positive Weather Solutions (PWS).

June, July, and August will all experience warmer-than-average temperatures, with some rain towards the end of June and the beginning of July, and thunderstorms caused by the humidity, but there may be record temperatures in the last part of summer.

Jonathan Powell, Senior Forecaster at PWS, told the Daily Mail: “There will be stifling temperatures, making it possibly the warmest UK summer on record and placing it at least in the top three warmest summers recorded.”

Last year, the Met Office was much-vilified for predicting a “BBQ summer” when in fact it was a wash-out. Temperatures had expected to be around, or above, 30°c, and heatwave advice was issued, however rainfall was higher than average over the summer, particularly in August, and the Met Office was forced to revise its forecast.

Powell added: “A very warm summer has been on the cards for some years, and the Met Office believed it was likely to happen last year. But now it is time to get the barbecue out – and people should be able to find a good deal on one after last year’s Met Office forecast.”

To read the full long-range forecast, visit: http://www.positiveweathersolutions.co.uk/UK-Long-Range.php

NYT > Space & Cosmos

If a union clearly forged in such good faith can flounder, what hope is there for the rest of us?

This week, Lost in Showbiz has been forced to drag itself to its laptop from the floor, where it has lain all week, prone and inconsolable. Like the rest of the country, it has existed these last few days in a state of mute incomprehension, the eerie silence rent only by a sound unheard since it was described by Clive James in the aftermath of Diana’s death – “‘No’, pronounced through an ascending sob, the consonant left behind in the chest voice as the vowel climbed into the head voice, the pure wail of lament whereby anyone, no matter how tone deaf, for one terrible moment becomes a singer” – and repeated rueful plays of Katie Price’s No 60 smash hit Free To Love Again, which, in its own way, also makes one think of the pure wail of lament whereby anyone, no matter how tone deaf, for one terrible moment becomes a singer.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, silence the dog with a juicy bone, something something, something to do with a muffled drum or something: the dream, if Lost in Showbiz may venture to quote the late John Lennon, is over. Unbelievable as it seemed, here it was, in black and white. KATIE: I HAD TO DUMP ALEX. The front page of the Sun, alas folded in Lost in Showbiz’s local newsagent in such a way as to omit the final word of the headline, leading to a brief glimmer of hope that the marriage wasn’t over yet, that the latest was merely that the Zeppelin-breasted lovely had suffered a pronounced case of “runny bum”. But there was no hope. Oh, Alex “The Reidinator” Reid. Oh, Jordan. The fairytale of our age, forged in the secret domain of Eros that is the office of the Outside Organisation publicity company, is dead.

“To Alex, it all seems purely like business and that she’s being cold-hearted,” offered one insider. How different that seems to 11 months ago, when the arc of their love was described in a simple statement that encapsulated every newlywed’s hopes and dreams: “The decision to marry has not been made with any pre-conceived commercial plan or media deal in place,” they giggled, like lovestruck teenagers on a first date. And like lovestruck teenagers, they impetuously ran away to be wed, surrounded only by their closest confidantes and a film crew from Living TV. If a union clearly forged in such good faith can flounder, then what hope have the rest of us?

It may be ghoulish to poke around in the dying embers of a love gone wrong, but as the floral tributes pile up outside the £2.5m eight-bedroom mansion in Surrey and the clamour grows for the prime minister to make an official statement – come on Cammo! We know you’re busy and the welfare state won’t systematically dismantle itself, but your people are suffering! – we’re all trying to understand the reasons this happened. The tabloid press is no help: clearly as befuddled by grief as the rest of us, it offers only wildly conflicting reports on the admittedly vital matter of The Reidinator’s sleeping arrangements. Alex has left the mansion! Alex is refusing to leave the mansion! Alex is sleeping in the same bed as Jordan (”the burly cage fighter has been creeping under the sheets every night to sleep beside the beauty”)! Alex is in the spare room! Alex is on the roof, demanding a helicopter and safe passage to Cuba, $ 200m in cash, the release of all political prisoners in Iran and an end to the Israeli blockade of Palestine!

To experience the raw emotions at source, Lost in Showbiz can only direct you, if you feel able to bear it, to Katie Price’s Twitter feed and ask you to imagine the kind of anguish that drove her to pour out her feelings to millions in one deeply affecting message shortly before the announcement of their separation: “I love 80s and 90s music wooooo.” By 80s music she surely means the final, desperate postcard from the edge that is Joy Division’s Closer. By 90s music, perhaps The Manic Street Preachers’ howl of impotent, nihilistic despair, The Holy Bible. She’s definitely not bopping around the kitchen to No Limits by 2 Unlimited and Bad Manners’s Lip Up Fatty.

Every day brings more harrowing 140-character frontline reports from a mind clearly half-maddened by sorrow, unable to think of anything beyond obsessively picking over the marriage’s failure: “Just bathed my dogs and they still smell yuk”, “Gutted missed beginning of Silent Witness boo hoo”. And yet, there is a weak glimmer of hope on the horizon, a brighter, happier future, promised by a feature in OK! headlined WHO’S RIGHT FOR MISS PRICE: WE REVEAL KATIE’S POTENTIAL SUITORS.

The author has helpfully provided a list of love matches selected with the utmost care, including a 16-year-old boy from One Direction and cricketer Shane Warne, who certainly seems like perfect husband material. Let’s not dwell on the fact that he was stripped of the Australian vice-captaincy after bombarding a British nurse with erotic text messages while married, broke up with his wife after sending erotic text messages to a pair of models, reconciled with his wife then broke up again after he accidentally sent her an erotic text message intended for another woman, then got together with Liz Hurley but sadly broke up after she discovered he’d been sending erotic text messages to a married mother of two. Put his seemingly demented obsession with sending erotic text messages to other women out of your mind! As OK! point out, the important thing is he’s got an Australian accent JUST LIKE PETER ANDRE.

Doubtless some may cavil that so has the bloke who played Harold Bishop in Neighbours and Francesco Mangione, dubbed the Mr Whippy Ice Cream Turf War Murderer after hacking a rival ice-cream van driver to death in Moonee Ponds in 2002, but Lost in Showbiz feels the gloom of the past week beginning to lift. Dry your eyes Katie! Is that the beeping of a newly arrived Ocker-accented erotic text message we hear? Lost in Showbiz suggests you answer it, and end the nation’s torment at a stroke.

Life and style | guardian.co.uk

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