As Mike Laycock gives his new online weather forecast for the weekend, he explains his fascination with anticyclones, depressions and wind chill factors.

I regularly wore an anorak as a child, and it was just as well. For by the age I was eight, I had my own thermometer, anemometer (wind speed measuring device), humidity detector and barometer, and was keeping a daily chart of the readings in my home town, Ilkley.

Yes, I was a real weather anorak and I guess I still am.

I blame my brother Anthony for my lifelong obsession with all things meteorological, as he introduced me to the misery of Atlantic depressions, (rain, cloud, wind, floods), the summer delight brought by an anticyclone over the Azores (if we're lucky, warm sunshine) and the excitement and apprehension caused by impending snowfall and ice when high pressure settles over Scandinavia in winter, bringing biting easterly winds from Siberia.

Ever since then, rarely a day has passed by in which I haven't had at least a passing interest in the weather forecast, fuelled in recent years by the improving standards of the increasingly sophisticated meteorological models.

And now it's my pleasure to bring my own modest weekend forecast for York and North Yorkshire to online readers. Not that this weekend's weather will bring many people much pleasure...