I keep trying to name storms. Why does the Met Office turn down my suggestions? | Zoe Williams

The UK’s most memorable storm occurred in 1987, almost 30 years before storms got names, and will therefore always be known as “the one that Michael Fish said definitely wouldn’t happen”. It was a devastating weather event, but if you were 14 and all the routes to school were blocked, yet the train to the cinema was unaccountably still running, and you went to see Hope and Glory – which, in a delicious twist of fate, was also about a kid who couldn’t go to school (although in his case because it had been destroyed in the blitz) – it was just about the best weather-related thing ever to happen. If I ever feel bad for Fish, who has a bunch of weather qualifications and yet saw his reputation defined by this one wrong call, it’s because I enjoyed that day so much that I feel I owe him. Ten years ago this month, the Met Office began naming storms with Abigail, which (who?) was unremarkable, unless you lived in the Outer Hebrides, where the schools closed and the power shut down, so nobody could even go to the cinema. That’s the thing about weather: it’s very unevenly distributed. There’s no way of getting those with the broadest shoulders to carry the heaviest weight. Storm Claudia, which has just passed, killed a woman in the Algarve and caused catastrophic flooding in south Wales, while everyone outside its path merely looked up, wondered whether it was named after Claudia Winkleman (it wasn’t – it was named by the Spanish meteorological agency), and went on with their day. There’s a purpose to the anthropomorphisations, though: it raises awareness, which means people can prepare, which ultimately saves lives, or so the weather people argue. We share our weather naming with Ireland and the Netherlands, while other European countries do their own but observe ours if it’s the same storm. Anyone can suggest names for future storms. Some time between Storm Dudley and Storm Eunice, I told my son, who was then 14, that they were named alphabetically. “Dur,” he said. “Obviously they’re not alphabetical, because U does not come after D.” That’s when I realised that he didn’t know how to spell Eunice, or that Q, U, X, Y and Z were omitted from the name scheme, and he had a tendency towards incredibly strong opinions based on incomplete knowledge. I don’t know where he got that from. Those letters, incidentally, are left out because the World Meteorological Organization deems them too difficult to find names for, which is just rude. I’ve been suggesting names constantly. I must have done it a hundred times. It would just be so cool to be able to call your friend and say, hey, you know Storm Tim? It is named after you. I’ve never got one away. I’ve leaned heavily Irish to suck up to Met Éireann, Ireland’s national meteorological office. I’ve done Dutch versions of English names; I’ve suggested the names of all the kids, multiple times, and somehow “Wubbo” has made it on to the 2025-26 rotation, while “Harper” has not. I grudgingly admire the fact that enough people went for “Dave”, rather than the posher, more weather-sounding David, that it will be our next winter storm, right after Chandra. The radical geographer Danny Dorling noted that Covid was a lot like a world war: if you were on the frontlines or you were bereaved, your experience of it was so different that, far from bringing the country together, these major disasters created invisible divisions at a vocabulary level, all of us using the same words to mean different things. Probably if your car is underwater, you’re not wild about the name Claudia. Probably when you’re affected in any real way by a storm, you would prefer them to be named after swearwords. • Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist