I was taught Met by a kindly old gentleman at Cranwell known, not very originally, as CuNim Jim. He explained everything as parcels of air being moved around. To prove his point one summer morning he took us outside and in the distance we could see the fair weather cumulus forming as the air rose up the small ridge at Leadenham out to the west. He actually instilled a real interest in me and if my training had gone badly, I might well have had a go at a career in meteorology.
In the early 70s when there was a bit of trouble brewing in Belize, we weren't allowed to use any diversions in Mexico or the USA. In their wisdom somebody in Air Support Command authorised us to regard Belize as an "Island Holding" destination where we just carried extra holding fuel rather than diversion fuel. This was really aimed at islands where the weather was usually predictable and not prone to long periods of poor weather. Anyway we set off from Gander in our Britannia in the early evening with a forecast of 10Kms+ visibility and 4/8 Cu at 2500ft (or whatever the terms were in the 70s). We flagged Nassau and the forecast for Belize was still the same. When we arrived at Belize just after dawn we were above solid cloud. The tower gave us the weather 10Kms+ and 4/8 Cu at 2500ft. We did an NDB approach which didn't even get us into the cloud and it became obvious that it was actually thick fog below us. The local fighter radar (Butcher??) gave us a talkdown which got us IMC but with no chance of seeing anything. I said to the tower "Could you please go outside and tell us what the cloudbase looks like to you". We could hear him push his chair back and open the door and when he came back he said "very, very low". Fortunately, my captain had taken as much fuel as we could from Nassau and we had a bit more than Island Holding. The navigator did some sums and announced that we could just make KIngston, Jamaica - Grand Cayman was closer, but the runway was too short for us. It was that or wait and hope the fog cleared. With no reliable forecast and no local knowledge of how long the fog might last we set off and arrived in Kingston sucking fumes some 2 1/2 hours later.
A few years later, on a Hercules squadron, our scribe wrote in the monthly station magazine an article entitled "The 10 most useless things to have on a flightdeck". No 1 was a recently serviced headset, no 2 was yesterday's met forecast, no 3 was today's met forecast. I can't remember the rest, but he managed to insult a number of other sections around the sation as well as the squadron navigators.