As always, you can bank on rain for this holiday
“THE English winter – ending in July to recommence in August.” Of course Lord Byron was not around to see the Banking and Financial Dealings Act of 1971 move the last bank holiday of the year in England to the final Monday in August. But when he made his dig at his home climate in Don Juan, this must surely have been the weekend he had in mind for winter to return.
It is hard to recall many bank holidays over the past 10 years or so (at this point memory fades into a Byronic fug) where it has not bucketed down.
Last year we endured a fortnight’s worth of rain in one weekend, as the wettest August on record ended in the dampest of squibs. 2011 still holds the record of being the coldest. On Sunday August 28 that year numerous Scottish weather stations failed to record temperatures above 48.4F (9.1C).
That continued a theme dating back to 2007 of each summer being wetter than “normal” – although in this era of advanced climate change, the meteorologists must soon surely redefine both what we mean by normal, and the seasons themselves. That is a column for another day.
As Byron’s quote attests, these late summer washouts are not purely the result of climate change but embedded in the British psyche over centuries.
Indeed, by consulting the Met Office record books one finds the wettest August bank holiday ever came in 1992. Heavy rainfall also lashed down across most of Britain following the tail-end of Hurricane Charley on Monday August 25, 1986.
This weekend, as ever, I head to north Wales. Perhaps on reflection this skews my perception of the proliferation of bank holiday downpours. As with many places across the British Isles, rain is forecast for there this weekend in between the last gasps of sunshine.
And then, for another year, it is goodbye to all that.