The village of Elzekers, population 1,140, has formally petitioned the Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) to be granted its own microclimate, on the grounds that it has now endured forty-one consecutive days of rain, that the rest of Belgium has, during the same period, been “merely overcast and a bit annoying,” and that this constitutes, in the village’s words, “a clear and persistent meteorological injustice.”
The petition, delivered to the RMI’s headquarters in Uccle by a delegation of seven farmers in waterproof trousers, requests that Elzekers be either (a) assigned a separate, drier weather system with immediate effect, or (b) formally reclassified as a lake, “which at least would be honest.”
“We are not asking for the sun. We are asking for a break.”
“We are a reasonable people,” said Greet Vandenbroeck, the village’s unofficial mayor-by-acclamation, standing under an umbrella beside the petition. “We are not asking for the sun. The sun would, frankly, alarm us. We are asking for a break. Forty-one days is not weather. Forty-one days is a lifestyle.”
The RMI, in a written response, said it was “deeply sympathetic” but that the allocation of microclimates was “not, at present, a service the Institute is equipped to provide,” and that the village’s weather was, regrettably, “consistent with the forecast, which was also wet.”
A constitutional question, inevitably
The village’s case has, inevitably in Belgium, taken a constitutional turn. A Flemish legal aid clinic has taken up the matter, arguing that the persistent rain may violate the villagers’ rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically Article 8, the right to private and family life, which the clinic argues “does not contemplate forty-one days of rain.”
The Council of Europe, asked whether Article 8 covered weather, declined to comment, saying only that it was “looking into it, and that it was, in Strasbourg, also raining.”
As of press time, Elzekers remained wet. The forecast for the forty-second day is, the RMI confirmed, also wet.