Do any of you have the five-day weather forecast for your home town from Yahoo Widgets on your desktop?

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You can find it here: http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/?q=5-day+weather+forecast . I discovered this wonderful piece of technology when I lived in Uruguay. A pretty little box that was immensely cheering. The five icons were never the same, except in summer, when five sunny faces shone at me most mornings. There were clearly understandable, well-defined symbols, representing comprehensible weather features like sun, rain, lightning, and, quite often in the winter, fog. In autumn there was a lovely one with pretty coloured leaves falling, which, I think, meant wind. Outside summer it didn't always get it right, and it changed quite a lot from one day to the next. 'Rain's been cancelled,' I'd announce. Or 'rain has been upgraded to storm'. 'Lightning on Wednesday.' 'Oops. No, lightning's coming on Tuesday now.' 'A few clouds, but temperature is up to 10 degrees.' 'Hey, 10 degrees tomorrow, but 20 the next day!'

But when I moved to Belgium, my widget got depressed. It invented a new symbol, which had never appeared in Uruguay. A vague, shapeless splodge of grey. And very often, my widget displays five of these in a row. And very often, it gets it right. Jacques Brel, the Belgian singer song-writer who died in 1978, wrote a wonderful song about Belgium: 'Le Plat Pays' - 'The Flat Land'. In it, he describes a sky so grey that it drives a canal to hang itself. Sometimes, when I look at my widgets in the morning I can sympahise with that canal.