One of Cardiff’s redeeming features is its climate. Prevailing westerlies from the Atlantic keep it generally mild and temperate, if a little damp. However, this natural blessing has lately been absent. Each morning I stick my head out of the window to look at the smoke pouring out of the chimneys of the Tremorfa scrap-metal works, and each morning the direction of the plume tells me that, yet again, the air-flow is from the north or the east. This has been going on for well nigh two years and as a result Cardiff hasn’t had a properly warm day for as long as I can remember. The heating’s on all the time, power bills are crippling, my nose perpetually runs, I have to wear layers of clothing just to go to the corner shop and my hands are like little blocks of ice – and it’s mid May! Whether this weather is just a meteorological blip or a sign of something more permanent – the long-dreaded ‘switching off’ of the Gulf Stream – remains to be seen. All I know is that if this carries on I’m out of here. I’ll hurl my matching white alligator luggage into the back of a cab, shriek “Rhoose!” at the driver and disappear in a cloud of burning rubber. There are no flights to Casablanca direct from Cardiff, so Alicante will have to do. I can make a living selling bespoke haikus, anagrams, tweets and cynghanedd on the beach. It’s important to have a dream.