Hundreds brave gloop for annual Maldon Mud Race across River Blackwater
Hundreds braved the Essex gloop for the annual Maldon Mud Race, which began in the 1970s, across the River Blackwater.
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Sixth-former Saski Madden, 17, of the town's Plume Academy, was fundraising for Bowel Cancer UK.
She said: 'It was a blur.
'So fun, so scary and for such a good cause!'
We revealed earlier how a "fairly chilly" spell is now expected to follow record-breaking hot weather as the UK marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
Temperatures will dip to "below average" as celebrations kick off on bank holiday Monday, but rise again throughout the week.
On the bank holiday itself, the Met Office forecasts temperatures will reach a maximum of 15C or 16C on the south coast of England on Monday, May 5.
But northern parts of the UK will "struggle to get into the double figures".
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Thousands of people are expected to line the streets for the spectacle which includes a Churchill speech performance by actor Timothy Spall, a flypast including the Red Arrows, and a military procession of 1,300 members of the armed forces.
The Met Office predicted the morning would start "bright for many", with showers across Lincolnshire and down into south-east England.
But in the afternoon most areas will be "dry with sunny spells", with more sun around for eastern and northern parts of the country compared to Sunday.
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
The Shipping Forecast celebrates 100 years as a national institution on the BBC
The shipping forecast is the ultimate safety guide for anyone using the seas around the UK and Ireland but in the 100 years since it started it has also won an unrivalled place in the nation's 4 2025 marks the centenary of its first BBC broadcast. In that time it has prevented the loss of countless lives at those decades it has also developed a cult following, lulling landlubbers to sleep, and inspiring music, poetry, art and writing. The rhythm and cadence of the report is unique, delivering a forecast for each of the 31 marine areas off our shores, loved by seadogs and landlubbers alike. 'Attention all shipping...' These days there are a multitude of ways for the marine and fishing industries to get their weather reports. However, the shipping forecast, issued by the Met Office, external on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, external, means that those who can't access private reports can still get the information they need. A significant number of imports get to the UK via the sea. With climate change and an increasing number of extreme weather events, it's arguable that the shipping forecast is more important than ever. Having a permanent trusted source of information is also vital for our national security because it reduces any potential impact of someone deliberately issuing misleading reports. 'Warnings of gales...' The forecast actually began as a concept long before radio existed, established in response to a tragic storm in the Irish Sea in 1859, when 133 ships went down and more than 800 people drowned. At the time Vice Admiral Robert Fitzroy was head of the newly formed UK Meteorology Office set up by the Board of Trade. By 1861 his staff had set up gale warnings which were issued using the electronic January 1924 Morse code was used to transmit the first 'weather shipping' bulletin by the UK Air Ministry on its own radio 18 months later in July 1925 the BBC took over the shipping forecast as part of its public service remit. It has been broadcast every day since then apart from during the Second World War when it was deemed it could give a critical advantage to the enemy, along with our weather forecasts in general. The importance the weather predictions played during that time cannot be underestimated especially in planning top-secret missions such as the D-Day invasion. 'Here's the shopping forecast!' Until very recently BBC Weather was part of the team along with the continuity announcers, which delivered the live bulletins - affectionately know as the 'Ships' - on Radio 4. It has professional and sentimental meaning to the Weather Centre, including forecaster Simon King, who inadvertently referred to it on air as 'the shopping forecast'."After spending so much time learning about the shipping areas and the pronunciation of things like North Utsire and South Utsire the first time I delivered the shipping forecast I said 'Good morning and now the shopping, I mean shipping forecast'," he remembers. "And my colleagues have never let me forget."Reading the forecast live is quite a skill as it has to hit nine and a half minutes precisely despite the script varying in length and it's full of tricky names and a series of disjointed words and phrases .Presenter Chris Fawkes said it was a challenge he relished. His colleague Matt Taylor used to make sure he hit the right moment by taking an alarm into the studio with day though he forgot to put it on silent. "Just as I was coming to the end it went off, so I just grabbed, threw it under the table and had to suffer the huge embarrassment straight afterwards," he Bett and Louise Lear have both found reading the Ships much trickier when you're not feeling a hundred percent."My biggest worry is that I'm going to sneeze," said Darren. "Now there is a cough button that you can press if you got a cold or something like that but there isn't a big enough sneeze button."But Louise Lear found another studio trick to get her through."One morning when I was absolutely full of cold, I couldn't stop my nose from running or from sneezing, so I had to very carefully just dip the fader on the microphone so I could take a cheeky sniff or a cough, and then raise it back up, and guess what, nobody knew," she even the best laid plans went awry for Tomasz Schafernaker one morning when he'd been asked at read the forecast at short notice and tried to make himself feel more awake by drinking a bit too much caffeine just before he went on air."In the middle of my broadcast all the tea and coffee came back up and I was just sick," he remembered. "But of course I quietly managed to step aside and some else in the studio seamlessly picked up the forecast from where I'd left off." 'Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire...' The Shipping Forecast always follows the same clockwise route around the UK and Ireland's waters starting at Viking, which gets its name from its location between Scotland and Norway. The areas are generally all named after local geographical features like sandbanks and rivers, however in 2002, Finisterre was renamed Fitzroy in tribute to the creator of the forecast. While BBC presenters have historically delivered it, occasionally celebrities have also got in on the act including writer Alan Bennett, Stephen Fry and the late Labour politician John Prescott. Poets Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney and Roger McGough have all found inspiration in 'The Ships' and it's been sampled by musicians including Radiohead, The Prodigy and Blur. 'Veering north-westerly, 5 or 6 later...' For those in the know - especially those who need to know - the lyrical content of the shipping forecast is vital just love it for it's melodic structure letting the words wash over them as they drift or sleep or try to catch a few more minutes in bed first thing in the morning. As well as gale and storm warnings, the forecast details visibility, pressure system changes, wind direction and the general state of the sea such as smooth or rough. Words like veering and backing are staples, along with phrases along the lines of 'becoming cyclonic' and 'good, occasionally poor'.Once you get into the swing of it it's not difficult to follow and the Met Office provides a glossary of terms, external to the last 100 years the forecast has undergone significant changes to keep up to date with new technology both in how the information is gathered and how it's shared. This work is ongoing and the Met Office is currently working with partners to assess how advance satellite data and AI models (among other things), could impact the service, and is looking at new ways to share the information including data being integrated on ships' display equipment. It is also backing the 10,000 Ships for the Ocean, external initiative, launched in June at the United Nations Ocean Conference, which aims to vastly increase the number of vessels equipped for ocean and weather can learn more about the history of the shipping forecast on the BBC on the Radio 4 and the Royal Museums Greenwich websites, external.
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Telegraph
Why is the Met Office adopting the language of climate alarmism?
I gather it's been hot down south. My sympathies. As Londoners were sweltering, we had a chilly breeze off the North Sea in Northumberland. The UK Met Office says it is 'virtually certain' that June (the hottest in England since 1884, second hottest in the UK) was made hotter by human activity. Duh! Even if temperatures were not affected by greenhouse gases, which they are, the 34.7C (94.5F) recorded in St James's Park on Tuesday might have something to do with that weather station being a low-reliability 'class 5' site with an error rating of 'up to 5C'. It's next to a very busy tarmac path. Plus, it is in the middle of a city and therefore subject to a more general 'urban heat island' effect. Research by Arup reckons London's heat island is worth 4.5C extra warmth on average. So yes, the heat is indeed partly man-made – but not necessarily in the way the Met Office means. Besides, it's not exactly unusual to have hot days in summer: it reached 36.7C (98.1F) in Northamptonshire in 1911. As the world gets slowly warmer, we will see more hot summer days, though not as much as we will see more mild winter nights: winter nighttime temperatures have risen faster than summer daytime ones, as predicted by the greenhouse effect, just as Arctic temperatures have risen faster than tropical ones. The Met Office exists to forecast the weather. But increasingly it seems bored by the day job so it likes to lecture us about climate change. And here it seems to have been embarrassingly duped by activists. Go on its climate pages and you find a forecast for the year 2070, that summers will be between one and six degrees warmer and 'up to' 60 per cent drier, depending on the region. A lot of wriggle room in those caveats, note. Then it admits: 'We base these changes on the RCP8.5 high emissions scenario.' Aha! Unbelievably, shockingly, this national forecasting body has chosen as its base case for the future of weather a debunked, highly implausible set of assumptions about the world economy that was never intended to be used this way. RCP8.5 is one of five projected futures for the world economy this century, dreamt up by economists. Here is what it assumes. First, the world becomes addicted to coal, burning 10 times – yes, 10 times! – as much coal in 2100 as we did in 2000 and even using coal to make fuel for aircraft and cars. Yes: that is really what it says. It projects that fully half of all the world's energy will be supplied by coal in 2100. Second, it assumes that the world population will have swelled to 12 billion people by 2100, way more than any demographer thinks is likely. Third, it assumes that innovation will somehow dry up so there's hardly any new technology to make our lives more fuel-efficient – and we won't even try to cut emissions. In short, this scenario is barking mad. Don't take my word for it. Here's what Carbon Brief, an activist website, has to say: 'The creators of RCP8.5 had not intended it to represent the most likely 'business as usual' outcome… Its subsequent use as such represents something of a breakdown in communication between energy systems modellers and the climate modelling community.' Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that RCP8.5 should not be used as a forecast. And here's its chief creator, Keywan Riahi: 'I wished I would have been clearer with what I meant by 'business as usual'.' In 2020, even the ultra-alarmist BBC said RCP8.5 was 'exceedingly unlikely'. Yet here, five years later, we have the Met Office itself still basing its forecasts for 2070 on ludicrous assumptions. And no, this is no 'breakdown in communications': this is deliberately seeking extreme predictions to scare people and so get media attention. If they used more realistic assumptions, they fear, the future would sound less terrifying. Come on, Met Office, do the decent thing and ditch the climate apocalypticism. If you must try to forecast the weather in 2070 – and for all your supercomputers, you generally admit you cannot reliably forecast the weather more than a week or two ahead – then use realistic assumptions. Even if it makes the future sound less scary.
Daily Mirror
15 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Sweltering European heatwave to send UK temperatures on 34C on these exact dates
Although fresher air is now hitting the UK Europe continues to struggle in soaring temperatures with signs that another heatwave could affect the UK in the middle of July Temperatures are set to reach sweltering heights in the coming days with the hottest days of the year forecast for the middle of July. This week running into the beginning of next week, temperatures will stay at around average for the time of the year. However, in the South the mercury will continue to rise until Friday 11 July, when a European heatwave will push UK temperatures past 30C. UK heat is expected to intensify to a high for the year for three days between Tuesday 15, and Thursday 17, leaving East Anglia enjoying a balmy 34C, according to Net Weather. This will be at the northwestern edge of more intense heat for mainland Europe. The GFS Model and ECM model also support this prediction. The heat can remain and build up over the Iberian Peninsula in summer, moving into southern France where sunshine will be very strong. The jetstream is expected to dip southwards past the UK this weekend leaving us with fresher air. Next week, the Azores high will persist, reaching over southern Britain. Lower pressures will bring cooler weather fronts over the northern half of the UK from the Atlantic. The GFS then shows disruption of the jet and this surge northwards of the heat through western Europe for the middle of July. The first day of July was the hottest day of the year with the mercury rising to 34.7 C at St James's Park in London. Close to this were East Malling, Writtle and Teddington, also passing 34C, accompanied by intense humidity. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, the top temperatures were between 17C to 20C as fresher air arrived from the northwest but London experienced another sultry, close night. This hot and humid start to July followed England's 'warmest June on record, the UK seeing its second warmest since the series began in 1884,' according to provisional Met Office statistics. Across Europe, a dangerous heatwave has caused havoc. There were red heat warnings for France, Belgium, Germany and Croatia as schools closed and in Italy, working outside was stopped as power blackouts occurred. Tropical nights, which is any night hotter than 20C, are a particular concern for people's health as there is no time to recover from the heat of the day. The last few days have still been warm for Greater London, but less humid and oppressive. For northern Britain and Northern Ireland, overnight temperatures have fallen back into single figures England will continue to see temperatures in the low to mid 20Cs for the next few days, perhaps reaching 27C with warm days but cooler nights.
