Sunday 8th July

Of course we in Britain are weather obsessed and always have been.  Though this year it seems we are quite justified, it simply hasn’t stopped raining.  It is now official, April May and June were the three wettest months on record.  And it is all the fault of the Jet-stream moving south.  We get most of our weather from the Gulf of Mexico, flowing across the Atlantic and hitting us with a belt of mild air.  But this year, so the Meterologists say it has shifted a bit south meaning that we are getting the weather that normally passes to the North of us; that is rain and rain and then more rain.  Every year there are unusual weather phenomena all over the world, but I have just seen on the news that Russia has just had severe flooding with about seventy-six people killed, and in America on the Eastern Seaboard they are suffering an unusually ferocious heat-wave.  So is this weather turmoil something unusual, is it the first harbinger of truly devastating stuff to come, is it perhaps the first tangible evidence of Global Warming.  Ever since the financial crash of 2008 the whole worlds attention had been on economics, and the environment has slipped down on the agenda.  But it certainly hasn’t gone away, and is perhaps a far greater threat to mankind than the fate of the euro, or whether China continues its march towards world domination at quite the same pace. The trouble is that even more than the financial crisis, the environmental one requires united action.  And we cannot seem to get different countries to agree on anything at the moment.

But as I write this the sun is shining, apologies to those of you in Devon or anywhere else where there is torrential rain, and though we know it is but a brief respite before the rain begins again, one cannot help but just bask in it for a while.  What the solution may be I really do not know, but I suppose if it is still raining like this in a year’s time, it might just jog someone into action.