Rain, Rain....

Well, the sun is shining brightly and it's really hot. And if it wasn't for those pesky rain clouds completely covering the sky, we'd be able to see and feel the thing. The good old Jet Stream is being blamed for yet another soggy summer; while great swathes of Europe are dodging burning forests and worrying about where the next piña colada is coming from, we're once again communally united in misery, as we indulge in that most British of preoccupations, moaning about the weather. Actually, a holiday without rain wouldn't be quite the thing here in good old Blighty; we need rain, so we can commiserate with our fellow travellers. It's a sort of bonding exercise, along the lines of the senior management team-bulding experiences, where they take six desk-bound executives and drive them to the edge of sanity in the curious belief that somehow this will help them work together far more efficiently. Curious, because it's very often those same executives that spend a significant amount of the time and energy plotting against their fellow workers.

But the unpredictability of our weather also has a perverse familiarity about it, a warm and comforting aspect that's revealed when we look out of the hotel restaurant window at leaden, dribbling skies and remark to our fellow diners "God; rain again. Where's that great summer we were promised, eh?" as though someone, somewhere in the bowels of the Met office has deliberately and wickedly raised our spirits in a quite sneaky and thoroughly un-British way by telling us it was all going to be wonderful this year and then changing the season from Summer to late-Autumn.

There are some good sites out there for weather. The beeb's is excellent, if you avoid their new and improved version but this site is the best. It shows the rain as scanned by the Met Office's rain radar thingy in 15 minute intervals, updated every 15 minutes. It's true, it's always 15 minutes out of date, but if you watch it for a moment you can predict when you're going to catch it. And that gives you a significant advantage in the hotel restaurant, because you can now announce with total confidence "It's going to rain for the next 15 minutes!"