You are apprentice weather gods, waiting to do your final test. This is a practical test: just as you’ll have to once you’re a proper weather god, you’ll need to listen carefully to the local shipping forecast and make sure all the weather in it happens where it said it would happen – all before the next broadcast, in an hour’s time. And you’ll want to make sure that when the weather happens in a region, it happens because of you and not a rival team of apprentices. The weather can only happen once, and you only get the marks if you made it happen.

So you’ll need to gather round the wireless and listen carefully to the locations and the sort of weather that’s due to happen there. Then you’ll need to plot a route through the regions mentioned in the forecast, trying to find a path that gets you the greatest number of marks. Do you want to race through a series of consecutive regions that are easy to cover but are pretty low-scoring? Or are you going to race between the two regions at the opposite ends of town to pick up the high marks from squalls, turning to gales later?

Once you get to a region, if you’ve arrived in good time, you’ll see a Commuter. Your job is to do the correct weather to the Commuter and take a picture as proof. You’ll need these pictures of Commuters in their sunny handkerchief hats and rain-soaked macs to give to the examiners in order to pick up your marks.

Straightforward, right? Listen to the forecast, choose a route, throw buckets of weather over the Commuters, get the marks and get ready to listen to the next broadcast. But you’ll have to keep an SMS ear out for the odd plan-changing Weather Advisory. And is it your imagination, or is the Forecaster slowly showing signs of having been in his cupboard for too long?