Any reader of these notes will consider that I am being perverse in selecting the 1953 made film staring Richard Widmark, Destination Gobi as my first choice of the month, as it is a ludicrous B second World War, allegedly based on a true incident in which a small party of two naval officers and a handful of ratings were dropped in the Gobi desert behind enemy lines during World War II in order to observe and report on weather conditions, and then enlisted the help of Mongolian tribe by providing saddles for their horses, with the consequence that when the enemy discovered their presence, the Mongolians helped the party to escape by crossing the desert, and reaching the coast, followed by a typical Boys Own ending. It is the kind of film which would not have attracted my attention except for the contemporary significance of its theme. If in wartime it was considered sufficiently important to risk lives behind enemy lines to study the weather, then surely with all our satellites, and our contemporary predicative technology, we can, together with other north Atlantic nations, take steps to monitor peacetime weather conditions, to an extent to be able to warn when life threatening extremes are forecast and which are capable of severely disrupting everyday activities?
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