White Christmas Read Free Page A

been the deputy
head of a girls’ school in Bournemouth for nearly twenty years and she had a
tendency to treat her only daughter like an errant sixth-former.
    ‘It’s really annoying, but I might have to work. Most of the
other presenters have young children and it doesn’t seem fair to ask for
Christmas off when I’m on my own…’
    ‘You’re not on your own,’ boomed Diana down the phone.
‘You’ve got us – and we want to see you.’
    ‘I know. And I’m desperate to see you. But I’ll get lots of
time off in the New Year. I’ll be down like a shot then.’
    Lizzie’s face flushed. She was the world’s worst liar. She
just hoped her mother didn’t suspect she was being economical with the truth.
The weather presenters’ Christmas rota hadn’t been finalised yet, but Lizzie
had offered to work and was keeping her fingers crossed that her boss would
take her up on it.
    ‘You’d better be,’ said Diana. ‘In fact if you don’t come to
Dorset soon I’ll come and stay with you.’
    ‘I will, Mum. I promise. And then we can celebrate Christmas
all over again. We can walk along the beach and toast crumpets on the fire –
all the things we used to do.’
    When she’d finished talking to her mother, Lizzie wandered
back into the main room and slumped on the sofa. The Last Ditch weatherman had
finished and the two news presenters, a glamorous young blonde and a
middle-aged man with silver hair, were discussing the favourites to win this
year’s X Factor. Lizzie’s favourite had been sent home weeks earlier so she
switched over to another channel. This was going to be the loneliest, most
miserable Christmas ever.

 
     
     
    FOUR
     
    ‘And after that fascinating talk on climate change, we are
now very privileged to welcome our last speaker - Lizzie Foster from the UK’s
top satellite news channel. Not only is she the weather star of Ace TV, she has
a physics degree from Cambridge and is an expert on cloud formation.’
    Hal took a slurp of his tea and yawned. Talk about feeling
like a fish out of water. A few weeks ago he was auditioning (unsuccessfully,
as it turned out) for panto parts and now he was sitting in a boring science
lecture. After all that advice from Pete Burton about ‘keeping it simple’ the
news directors at Last Ditch News had decided that it would perhaps be a good
idea if he knew what cold fronts and warm fronts actually were. So they’d
dispatched him to Oxford for a one-day workshop entitled Making Sense of the
Weather. Hal had assumed they were joking and laughed uproariously for half a
minute before he looked at their startled faces and realised that they were
deadly serious.
    After his frenetic first week at the TV station, Hal had
been tempted to give the course a miss and call in sick. But his innate honesty
got the better of him and he’d caught the early train to Oxford as planned. So
here he was, sitting in a lecture hall on an old cobbled street, listening to a
bunch of academics explaining how the weather worked.
    Lizzie Foster’s talk was the final lecture of the day - and
by far the most inspiring. She really brought the subject alive, thought Hal,
feeling like a fraud. While he simply stood in front of the camera at Last
Ditch News and read his script, adding in the odd joke here and there, she
actually studied weather data and charts. After listening to her for forty-five
minutes he finally understood the difference between cyclones and
anti-cyclones, both of which had been an unfathomable mystery to him before. She
was also a lot prettier than the earlier speakers, who’d mostly been elderly
men in dusty jackets with leather patches on the elbows. Dark-haired, with
lively green eyes and a wide smile, she was clearly passionate about her
subject and determined to help the viewers make sense of it.
    ‘I think we’ve just got time for a couple of questions,’ she
said, quickly consulting the clock at the back of the lecture hall. ‘If you’d
like to