`If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it.'
The play, you will remember, is Shakespeare's Twelfth Night , and these opening lines are spoken by Duke Orsino of Illyria, a country which corresponds closely to what, until a little while ago, we knew as Yugoslavia.
Now interestingly, if this work is anything to go by, that part of the world has always been subject to some chaos and disorder, since confusion is the very hallmark of the play. Indeed it is there from the beginning, when Viola steps from a shipwreck onto the beach and enigmatically asks: "And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium."
But it is interesting to speculate if the wreck that caused Viola's vacancy of mind was in its turn caused by the "bora", a phenomenon notorious along that former Yugoslavian coast.
The bora is a harsh and bitter wind that blows down into the Adriatic at intervals between December and mid-March. Its source is in the mountains, anywhere from the Dolomites in Italy around to the Dinaric Alps, and it is an unwelcome winter visitor in those parts from Trieste, just inside the Italian border, right down the coastline to Albania. It is a "fall" or "katabatic" wind, exacerbated by the funnelling effect of the mountain valleys extending towards the coast.
A strong katabatic wind occurs when air at relatively high altitudes is cooled by contact with a cold snow-covered mountain surface underneath. As this air becomes colder than the free atmosphere surrounding it, it begins to slide down the mountain like an avalanche. The movement is gentle where the slope is slight, but in other places the air may plunge headlong over a precipice in the form of a turbulent cataract of wind, and its ferocity is often enhanced by constriction as it is channelled down the narrow mountain passes towards the sea.
The icy bora sets in very suddenly, triggered, usually, by a suitable configuration of barometric pressure. It frequently reaches speeds of well over gale force, with gusts to more than 100 m.p.h., and because of its sudden onset and subsequent impetuosity, it is a major hazard to shipping along the eastern coastline of the Adriatic.
Be all that as it may, the Twelfth Night chaos in Illyria came to a happy resolution in the end - indeed with an epilogue that provides some excellent closing lines for Weather Eye:
A great while ago the world begun,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.