We’ve had wonderful summer weather this year in the UK.
In some parts of the world you can guarantee what the weather is going to be like from week to week, year to year. In the UK there is nothing predictable about the weather. Some years it’s not even clear whether we’ve had a summer.
This year’s weather has been an ideal summer. We’ve had lots of sunshine and also a nice amount of rain. We don’t really like to go for too long without a bit of a downpour, we’re just not used to it. As an example, I was talking to our window-cleaner this evening and he said that he’d gone to the Lake District camping for a few days, but come back after only two nights because it was just too hot. A few days of sunshine followed by a cloudburst or two is what we regard as perfect.
This flow of warm and rain gives us lush countryside which we find delightful.
It also gives us lots of opportunities to experience that wonderful scent as the first rain descends from the skies after a period of drying sunshine.
It’s an aroma of refreshment. It’s a fragrance of cooling. It’s a perfume of clear air.
The sunshine is a blessing, but so is the deluge that follows it.
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
Graham Chastney 