THE sun is finally setting on the career of Worcester News weatherman Paul Damari . The man who has been providing us with forecasts through fair and foul for nearly 30 years is calling it a day before a bolt from the blue strikes him down.

“I’m 61 now and I’ve got friends who have almost worked themselves to death as they got older,” he said. “I want to retire while I’m still in good health and while I can. Weather forecasting these days is very pressurised. “You can’t afford to put a foot wrong and I want to go before I do a Michael Fish [the forecaster who famously dismissed warnings of a hurricane in 1987, which subsequently killed 18 people]. “I have clients all over the UK and abroad and they ring up all the time wanting weather updates. “People don’t realise that. Very often I only have two or three hours sleep a night and it can’t go on.”

Things have also not got any easier in the Damari household in Northwick Walk, Worcester, since Paul’s effervescent wife and “right hand man” Sandra was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2004. The pair have been quite a double act and the mood of any phone call to the Damari home was immediately lightened by Sandra’s cheery laugh. In her husband’s words: “She’s a ray of sunshine.” Appropriate for a weatherman.

Paul’s fascination with the weather began in unlikely circumstances. He was a virtually a baby when lightning struck the Damari house in the Brickfields area of Worcester and his mother had an amazing escape. “The Evening News said the shock turned her hair white,” he laughed.

“But it didn’t. She was blond anyway and all the soot coming down the chimney turned it black. That was the first time I realised the power of the weather.”

During his school days at Cherry Orchard Primary and then Nunnery Wood Secondary, he was always the first pupil to volunteer for “weather watch”. Mr Damari, who will put away his weathervane on September 30, then went to Pershore Horticultural College and worked for 19 years in the parks department of Worcester City Council , particularly in Cripplegate and then Gheluvelt parks, where his weather studies played an important part.

In 1982, he went full time as a weather forecaster with a weather station full of the latest equipment set up in his back garden. All this is going as he sets his sights on retirement, developing his photography hobby, writing poetry and maybe a book about his life.

And before anything can rain on his parade.