Inclement Weather

Now that autumn is here to stay and the weather is beginning to take a wintry turn, it is time to look back at the season that has just passed.

Summer 2004 will probably always be remembered as a wet one, with storms and torrential rain in August causing flooding and landslides all over the country. But that wasn't quite the whole story. We may not have had the record-breaking temperatures of last year but it was only really the middle month of the summer that was really bad. The rest of it was pretty good: dry, warm & sunny.

It's funny how the human brain tends to become preoccupied with recent events, particularly where the weather is concerned. After a prolonged period of rain, we seem to forget what it is like to have the sun on our faces. It's the same with a refreshing shower after a dry spell. What we do tend to remember from further in the past are the extremes of weather, such as those really hot days last year or the very wet ones of the last couple of months. Because that's all we recall, we start to think they were the prevalent conditions for a much longer period of time than was actually the case.

This summer may have been wetter than normal but, thinking back, I can't actually remember getting wet very often, so it can't have been raining very much when I was outside. Certainly, I got far wetter yesterday on the way to work than I did at any point over the summer. That suggests it was actually drier than I thought

Incidentally, while on the subject of the summer's weather, I have a little tale to tell about luck. We wanted to host a barbeque at the end of June, a late house-warming sort of thing. The weather had been lovely in the weeks before hand but on the day of our party it became grey and cold and miserable. It stayed dry for a while but it wasn't nice so we gave up on being outside and had an indoor grill party instead. Of course, the weather soon cleared up again and July started nicely.

We then went to three separate barbeques in August, the month with all the rain. The first two were hot and sunny, the last one was dry up to the point where we went home. It's just not fair.