I am standing in a hail storm reading a weather app that says the day will stay clear and sunny. Nil precipitation. I wipe the pellets off the screen to be sure. Yes, nil precipitation. A pleasant 16 degrees. Might even feel, in places, like 18. Air quality good, the app says. I have a mouth full of diesel.

That was written this morning. This evening I’m wearing my heaviest overcoat, a Siberian fur hat and arctic gloves. It’s going to be freezing, my app warns. Not the previous app – I’d be a fool to go on with that – but a new app. Already there’s something about this new app that I like. It seems to sense the weather I want it to be. And I want it to be a freezing night because I’m watching skaters on the rink at Somerset House on the Strand in London.

I haven’t come to skate myself – the days when people gathered at Derby Street Ice Palace in Manchester to watch my butterfly jumps are over – but I love the atmosphere of the ice still: the salty hissing of the skates, the memory of all the ice-skating scenes in Russian literature, which are invariably a prelude to adultery.

Against such a bracing tang of ice-driven excitation, one needs to wrap up warm. Which is exactly what my new app has told me to do. The trouble is, it’s not in the slightest bit cold and I can barely move for all the clothes I’m wearing.

I encounter a friend who’s in a light linen jacket and has the top three buttons of his shirt undone. He wants to know why I’m dressed the way I am. I show him my app. He shows me his. I want his.

I’ve been asked why I bother with weather apps at all. Why don’t I just look out of the window? That’s a dumb-ass question. What you see when you look out of a window is now; what an app is meant to help you with is later.

In pre-weather-app times, later was a terrifying concept. Later was the sum total of all that you didn’t know. Our mothers prepared us for later by making sure we didn’t leave the house without a pullover under our shirts, a scarf under our pullover, a folded pac-a-mac in our back pocket and a woman’s umbrella. Technology is meant to put an end to all that. Technology is the future in our hands.

Apparently there’s a new weather app for couples that enables one of you to walk in the snow while the other is enjoying a heatwave. We’ll be downloading ours tomorrow – which promises to be fine, by the way.