If ever there was something on the order of a universal thematic for linking disparate peoples, classes, genders, generations, etc., it would have to be the weather. Not for any deeply philosophical reason. No, simply because weather is the very stuff of small talk. It is the paradigmatic subject for idle chit-chat. How the weather has been, what the weather will do and how very inclement and perfectly sublime the weather now is, are all ideal subjects for light social dialogue. Striking up a conversation? Try the weather. At a loss for words or simply bored? Again, the weather. Bit of a stiff knee? Most certainly the weather.

In his Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, Flaubert writes under the heading weather: 'Eternal topic of conversation. Universal cause of ailments. Always complain of the weather.' It seems what was true in the late 19th century is still true today. At an awkward moment in conversation, who among us has not greeted a turn to the weather like an old friend, and there in the midst of it - tension and anxiety dissipating - relaxed and breathed easy once again. If empty, superficial, and somewhat ignoble, the topic of weather seems to provide a locus of commonality between otherwise alien perspectives. Even if it only does forge the fiction of a social bond, the power of the weather to bridge the problem of difference seems undeniable. Via some undisclosed transition or turn, the weather normalises the most unlikely of relations.

Probing this phenomenon in