A Different View with Dave O’Connell

for meteorologists, naming storms is probably the equivalent of lads in the office discussing changes they might make to their Fantasy Football teams after the dust has settled on Deadline Day; something to be taken seriously, but not like it’s your real work.

And yet you’d have thought that a fundamental attribute for a storm name would that it should carry some weight of threat — a way of subliminally telling people to batten down the hatches, tie down the trampoline, and make sure the garden furniture is where it usually is…in the garden shed.

Instead it reads like the line-up for a hedonistic week in Ibiza or the massive jam at the end of the Fleadh Cheoil. Storm Marty? Storm Dave? Storm Fionnuala? Storm Tadhg?

They should be called Storm Armageddon, Storm Despair, Storm Cataclysm, Storm Apocalypse; words that evoke visions of calamity, not cuddliness.

Even one that did make the list — Storm Bram, which is specifically called in honour of Bram Stoker — would have carried much more threat if they called it Storm Dracula.

That said, I’m thrilled to see my own name there — or I was until I discovered that it was included because a woman contacted the UK Met Service to ask them if they’d call a storm after her husband.

Because, she said, ‘my beloved husband can snore three times louder than any storm’.

The problem with a storm called Dave is two-fold; as has been mentioned, as a name, it carries absolutely no threat. But also it’s far too common a title to ever give to anything as unique as a life-threatening weather event.

Cable or Sky TV viewers will be familiar with a channel that used to be called Dave — these days known as U&Dave because of corporate rebranding to link a whole load of channels run by UKTV.

But the point was that they chose the name in the first place because ‘everyone knows a bloke called Dave’. They were even cleverer with their ‘+1’ option known for many years as Dave Ja Vu.

For the few who don’t know Dave (the TV channel), it was designed as a sort of a lads’ station, with programmes about breaking and making things; shows about cars; loads of comedy.

Most of it was repeats of stuff you’d seen elsewhere before, but it was all packaged under Dave, so that it was familiar and friendly, non-threatening…the exact opposite to what you’re trying to do when naming a storm.