IT ALWAYS seems to be sunny when BBC Northern Ireland weather presenter Barra Best is around. One of the north's most affable redheads and a man who relishes banter and craic more than most, the Belfast man's genial personality shines through, whether he's predicting thunder storms or a rare stretch of settled weather on our televisions or radio.
It's been seven years since he took on the mantle of 'weather man', and it's a job that's important to the very fabric of life here.
"I've learnt over the years that it's the simple things that people appreciate from my reports," Best says. "Essentially I try and tell people how they can use the weather in everyday life and I try to imagine when I'm reporting that I'm sitting talking with my mum on the sofa.
"I can talk to them about the science of it all and how the weather systems are affecting us, but as soon as I say something like 'Leave the umbrella in the house tomorrow', or 'It's a quare washing day tomorrow', that's what really clicks with people."
The 35-year-old, who also reports news and current affairs, was born and reared in the Clonard area of west Belfast. Now 'emigrated' to north Belfast, Best is currently single and he's very much "loving life" at the moment.
Family and friends are hugely important to him; he regularly socialises and holidays with his mum Cathy, sister Bronach and dad Aiden as well as BBC colleagues and other friends. He had a very happy childhood, flitting between his parents' house and that of his granny Kathleen who lived at the end of the street.
Best says he discovered an entrepreneurial streak at the age of eight or nine when, seeing how grown-ups offered to wash the cars parked in his street of the people attending the Clonard novena, he set up shop as well to earn extra pocket-money for his collection of pets, which included a white rat.
He recently made 'national' headlines – in both senses – after a tongue-in-cheek social media post in January from PSNI Craigavon calling for him to "turn himself in" after his promised fall of snow failed to materialise, went viral online.
"That was one of the highlights of the last few years," he laughs. "I woke up one morning to see an arrest warrant on my social media feed and thought 'My God'. Then I realised it was a spoof – I just laughed.
"It went viral and was on all the huge media websites across Ireland such as joe.ie. It was on the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and the BBC website. The banter we got out of that was just brilliant. It just happened to coincide with me going on my first ski trip to Andorra a week later so I was able to tease the PSNI back then, saying I had plenty of snow.
"But fair play to them for doing it."
The last time a television weather presenter made so many headlines was the ill-fated weather man Michael Fish who was blamed for failing to warn about the Great Storm of 1987, which devastated south-east England, killing 19 people in its wake.
Does making a mistake as epic as that attributed – perhaps unfairly – to the veteran forecaster weigh on Best's mind?
"You can't become too fixated in getting everything 100 per cent right because Irish weather is so changeable, with the weather systems coming off the Atlantic. Things can change very quickly, so if you have that constant worry you probably won't enjoy the job. Thankfully nothing had gone drastically wrong and I hope that there was nothing more serious that the snow failure in Craigavon.
"I get people messaging me saying I put the washing out based on what you told me and now it's lashing down. It's usually just banter. I honestly don't think I've had a cross word from anyone and that's what I really enjoy about it."
Best explains that the reason the BBC does not provide anything longer than five-day forecasts is that while a 48-hour forecast can be very accurate due to computer simulations, beyond that the forecast is more indicative, referring to weather that is likely to happen.
"It would be different if we lived in Spain where their summers are more or less exactly the same every year but here no summer or winter is the same," he says. "That's why it's impossible to say with real certainty. I would love to be able to sit here and say that this summer is going to be the best barbecue summer we ever had but I'm not going to do it. Because that would be my Michael Fish moment."
Away from weather duties, Best is also a television presenter, fronting two series of popular railway history programme, Walk the Line, tracking the forgotten railway lines that once criss-crossed the countryside in 2014-15, and last year's Weather Watchers with Barra Best. He has also co-hosted BBC Northern Ireland’s Children in Need programme on BBC One for several years and fronted the BBC’s hugely popular Stargazing Live programme in Northern Ireland.
He's in work at Ormeau Avenue from 4.45am to do the weather reports for TV, Radio Ulster, Radio Foyle and online until about 11am five days a week. He then does a shift on television news from 12noon to 7pm.
After 18 months of working in an IT job, he decided to study Broadcast Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston before joining the BBC Northern Ireland news team several years later, after reporting stints with Downtown Radio and Citybeat.
While he found being a full-time journalism student "daunting" after being used to a better lifestyle as an IT specialist, it's a decision he doesn't regret.
"The weather is now my passion," Best declares. "It's not something that I thought about growing up but now it is. I'm a weather presenter and it took a lot for me to get up to speed with all the metrological terms that I've studied throughout the years. It's always a challenge and there is never a single day that's the same, which is always good as you constantly hit the ground running when you go into work."
And what does Barra Best think the weather holds in store for us this Easter?
"We have more chance of seeing snow showers at Easter than at Christmas," he tells me. "In fact there's more chance of seeing the Easter bunny in snow that there is Santa – that's just the way it is for us." But as to whether or not we really are likely to get a white Easter, we'll just have to keep abreast of Best's forecasts to find out because, for now, "it's just too far ahead to say!"
