Live From London: Your Holiday Weekend Weather Apocaforecast

Note: Gavin Cleaver, the Observer's former web editor and acolyte in the Church of Pete Delkus, WFAA weather god, had to leave us and return to his home in England last year. We miss his funny accent, his terrible taste in barbecue and his adorable insistence that soccer is a spectator sport. Most of all we miss his weather forecasts, in which he coined the terms rainpocalypse, fogpocalypse and generally wrote of the mind-numbing terror North Texas' climate inflicted upon his English soul. We thought he'd be the perfect man to give you the Thanksgiving weekend weather forecast.

Dear Dallas,

Since I've been away, you've had two droughts, a flood, several tornadoes, probably a fire, an impressive quantity of Irving-based racism, and now you're having Thanksgiving.

I only regret missing one of those things.

St. Delkus has informed me, however, that I no longer have anything to regret, because apparently by the time you'd usually be hunkered down on a Friday in a line to get into a shopping center, all of Dallas will be floating around in Galveston, a shattered mess of wood and dry turkey. Yes, the turkey will still be dry.

Here is a recap of what has happened in my new, and indeed old, home London during the time period in which your Lord has delivered his verdict upon your area of North Texas — drizzle. A light smattering of water. That's it. When I got off the plane, finally exiting the wobegone concrete oven you call a city, the sky in west London was slate grey. There was no sky to be seen. The gentle nuzzle of a rainfall that couldn't drown a bee caressed my sun-scarred cheek. I was home, and it was glorious. Truly this city has been saved by the sky deity you beseech to not drown or burn you for just five minutes.

But enough about me. What were your plans for Thanksgiving? Were you going to eat food? The food is all gone. It's already at the bottom of a lake. Were you going to drink beer? The beer is now so watered down that a homeopath think it's dangerously alcoholic.

What about your friends? Were they coming round? Your family, perhaps? All dead. Washed into a ravine. Do you have ravines? I don't even remember. I'm too busy enjoying not paying for healthcare.

All of your plans, then, they’re over. Indeed, looking into the long term, this devastating 5 to 7 inches of rain, timed by Yahweh to impact you and the ones you love as much as possible over the chilly long weekend, is going to ruin everything. By Monday, your workplace will be somewhere near Tennessee, a moody backdrop for whatever series is currently trying to recreate True Detective season one, a rusted Generic Co. sign sticking out of a swamp where someone is being shot.

You might imagine that this will be a boon, that the loss of the measly vacation allowance and negligible health benefits tied to your job were a small price to pay for the extraordinary devastation writ large across the life of whatever Ben Carson-approved entrepreneur you were lucky to lace the boots of every day from 8.30 a.m., but you’d be wrong.

With no economy to speak of, and a governor seemingly unwilling to fix the economy by importing the sort of young, driven, hard-working, well-qualified, spirited labor force that the rest of the world is distributing at the moment, you’ll soon be looking to flee. You can always come to Britain. We’re accepting refugees.