Saturday 18th January

In Britain not only is the weather a major talking point, it is also a major moaning point.  We seem never to be happy.  Too cold, too wet, too windy, too overcast, too hot even; we never seem to be content.  And there may be a good reason for this.  We are in the temperate zone and being an offshore island we get most of our weather form the West, form the vast Atlantic, in fact straight from the Carribean, the Gulf of Mexico.  This is a lot further South then the latitude we sit on, so in general our weather is milder than Germany, Poland or the Scandinavian countries.  In fact several countries which lie far to the South of us are far colder in Winter.   But this is only part of the story, we also get some of our weather from the North and the East, and so we get cold blasts too.  In fact it is quite rare that we get just the Gulf Stream affecting us, as we have had for the last few weeks, bringing constant rain, wind and actually very mild temperatures.

And I think the key to our weather moaning is that we like our weather to be changeable.  We don’t like a spell of consistently the same weather.  If we have a heat-wave we are quick to tire of it.  Snow on the ground for longer than a week makes us all miserable, and worst of all persistent rain drives us mad.  And actually whatever weather we get when it persists for more than a few days and we tire of it, perpetually seeking a change in the weather.