Bank holiday weather - typical!

It’s another long weekend, and yet again the weather is predicted to be at best average and at worst, pretty dismal.

It does seem to be a recurring coincidence that each time we all get a day off from the office (I appreciate this doesn’t necessarily apply to you if you work in retail or an emergency service where 24/7 cover has to be provided) the weather is pretty s**t! And I’m sure it’s not my imagination; Christmas was damp, icy and cold (but then I suppose you might expect that in late December although crisp winter sunshine is some of the best there is), Easter was grey and dreary, and the early May bank holiday is also wet, managing a measly eleven degrees in the process.

The English of course have a national obsession with the weather and follow the forecasts religiously. Whenever we are stuck for a topic of conversation, we either turn to the weather or someone’s ailments for inspiration. As Professor Higgins says to Eliza in ‘My Fair Lady’ “either talk about the weather or your health” as a failsafe in any conversation.

If you believe what you are told, we are living in a time of extremes for our weather and climate, but if you talk to oldies, they can always remember a winter that was colder, wetter, had more snow or a summer that was hotter and drier.

For instance, there are photos of me as a baby in the very severe winter they had in 1963, being held in my Granddad’s arms at the foot of a bank of snow which dwarfed him and must have been ten feet high. He had apparently just dug his way through it just to get out of his house. I remember when I was a child in the late 1960s we lived in a little house near a stream, which itself ran beneath a bridge spanning the road. One winter we had so much rain that this innocuous little trickle became a raging torrent, spilling up over the top of the bridge and flooding the road outside out house. My Mum and Dad spent all day one Saturday pushing stranded motorists out of the enormous puddle they had just rashly tried to drive through, with me watching goggle eyed from the safety of the front garden. As a teenager, I remember the scorching summer of 1976, with endless lazy days in the sun and standpipes for water.

Nor is extreme weather a modern phenomenon. It is well documented (I think there is even a famous painting of it) that back in Tudor times it was so cold one winter that the Thames froze over for several weeks. Even earlier, back in mediaeval times and I think around the time of the battle of Evesham in 1265 between Simon de Montfort ( a pretender to the throne and by all accounts a gorgeous mediaeval sex god if ever there was one) and Edward III, there was so much rain that the battlefields were flooded causing raging disease (probably typhoid) and foot-rot (presumably a sort of very advanced athlete’s foot) for thousands of troops which ultimately decided the winner (Edward III) whose troops were best equipped to cope with the sodden conditions.

Listening to the media now you could be forgiven for believing that extreme weather never happened before 1990 and all was calm on the meteorological front. But clearly, when you look back at history, that’s rubbish. And how often do they get it wrong!?

It has to be hoped that we will receive some recompense for the awful weather we have had for the first part of this year over the summer, and be able to enjoy some lazy warm days in the garden. I don’t care if they say it has been the driest two years in the last twenty, it certainly doesn’t feel like it and I want some sunshine. And where is all the recent rainfall going? It cascades down our road like a river – surely somewhere a drain is catching that and sending it to some reservoir or treatment works to be re-used.

And if not, why not?