Now the second rainiest month of the year, whatever happened to the sunny Augusts of our childhoods?

Put away your shorts and t- shirts — if you haven’t already — and reach for the oilskins. the great August washout is upon us damp, shivering souls who must work all summer, or who are bravely enduring staycations.

Forecasters warned yesterday that large swathes of the country would be hit by torrential downpours this week, with severe weather warnings for several regions, imperilling homes, roads and businesses.

Meanwhile, on the continent it’s unbridled sunshine and record temperatures, with only the odd forest fire to cloud summer fun.

But we inhabitants of this Sceptred Isle shouldn’t take it personally, say meteorologists. For ’twas ever thus. Indeed, BBC weather presenter Louise Lear tried to leaven her forecast by telling Radio 4 today programme listeners: ‘Yes, a summer month, but in England and Wales, believe it or not, August is one of the wettest months of the year.’

Really? What about those sun- scalded childhood memories of endless blue skies and molten ice creams while holidaying on some British costa? Are they just the product of a mass folk delusion? Or have the weather people got it wrong again?

Well, Ms Lear has good reason to be aware of damp Augusts. It was this time last year that this most professional of Met Office presenters became an internet sensation, thanks to footage of her giggling uncontrollably while trying to warn BBC viewers of heavy rain and gale-force winds.

She has never revealed the source of her mirth. But it’s true that, as far as the British summer goes, the joke’s on us.

OVER the past decade, my old school friends and I have changed the timing of our annual motorcycling ‘ summer’ weekend to springtime because we kept getting utterly soaked. And there is nothing sadder than cold, wet, miserable middle-aged bikers trying to warm themselves with mugs of coffee in the shelter of a rainswept seaside cafe.

Likewise, I’ve tended an allotment for more than a decade, but in recent years I’ve learned to do the minimum possible work in August, as rain transforms it into a swamp.

In fact, the British have been complaining about August washout for centuries.

Back in 1823, Lord Byron wrote of: ‘the English winter, ending in July, to recommence in August.’

Nor are extreme weather events in August unheard of. In North Devon, residents still gather each year to commemorate the floods that devastated Lynmouth and Lynton on August 15 and 16, 1952. A total of 34 people were killed after a storm of tropical intensity broke over south-west England.

Fifty-two years later to the day, in 2004, eight hours of heavy rain caused flooding in the North Cornish villages of Boscastle and Crackington Haven.

For the definitive answer on wet Augusts and whether or not they are getting worse, let us turn to a statistician.

terence Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics (that’s using maths to describe economic systems) at Loughborough university, has conducted in-depth studies of the uK’s historical weather patterns.

His most recent, published last year in the journal Cogent Geoscience, concludes that over the previous 40 years our summers had, on average, been getting a little bit drier, and our winters somewhat wetter. But the differences are measurable in only fractions of a millimetre.

What is true is that statistically August is the wettest of the three summer months. On average, some measures place it as the second wettest month of the year behind December, due largely to a high incidence of heavy showers.

So what of those cherished childhood memories of blazing August days scented by fish-paste sandwiches and calamine lotion? I can’t recall a single rainy day from our annual family holidays in Folkestone.

For this we must blame nostalgia — or, more specifically, what psychologists call ‘fading affect bias’.

Over the years, it seems, we reconstruct our long- term memories into neat little packages. As the memories get sorted and re- sorted by our brains, we tend to forget the negative things (most probably for the sake of our mental health) and recall the positive images more vividly.

thus, according to Dr tim Wildschut, associate professor of psychology at Southampton university: ‘We remember sunny, beautiful days, but not the miserable, rainy days in between. [the sunny] days are the stuff of nostalgia, the stuff that is remembered well later on. the boring days you spend indoors that merge into each other are not.’

(It can’t have been sunny on the one occasion my family braved a day-trip to France. Our ferry got caught in a Force 9 and nearly sank under the weight of Seventies holidaymakers’ vomit. Not even ‘fading affect bias’ can erase that particular August trauma.)

If it all feels so much sunnier back in Augusts past, why does it feel so much greyer and rainier in recent years? there is another psychological effect at play here: in the short term, we remember rainy days better.

this phenomenon was uncovered by Joseph Forgas, a psychologist at the university of New South Wales in 2009.

His research found that on rainy days, shoppers remember three times as many objects in the shops they visited than on sunny days.

Forgas’s tests also revealed that the shoppers were in markedly worse moods when it was raining. His results reinforce the theory that we pay more attention to things when we are in a foul temper — perhaps as an evolutionary strategy for surviving adversity, when we have to be at our sharpest in order to stay alive.

Of course, our greatest hopes for good weather in August are for the bank holiday.

And when it fails to meet those expectations — as it is bound to do in our changeable temperate climate — we get into even more of a tizz about the forecasts.

We’ve even tried to change the date of the August bank holiday to improve things. From 1872 — when bank holidays were introduced — until the mid-Sixties, the August bank holiday was fixed to the first Monday in the month.

After poor weather ruined those Fifties and early-Sixties breaks, the public clamoured for it to be switched to a more potentially clement date. In response, the government moved it to the last weekend of the month.

We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the first late-August holiday, in 1965, was cool and cloudy with blustery winds and rain. the following year saw heavy downpours and thunderstorms across the country.

AT Winchester, in the ‘sunny’ South, a full two inches of rain drenched daytrippers. So what can we expect for this August? Well, thankfully, there’s hope on the horizon.

Current miserable conditions are being blamed on the jet stream, a fast-flowing ribbon of air more than five miles up in the atmosphere, thousands of miles long and at some points hundreds of miles wide. It is created by the difference between cold air at the poles and warm air at the tropics.

Numerous factors, including the Earth’s spin, cause the jet stream to ‘wobble’ around.

When it is to the south of Britain — as it is now — it puts us on the cold, rainy side.

the Met Office says there are signs the jet stream will be on the move north next week and the weather may settle down.

Historical trends support this. Statistics over the past 30 years show that in England and Wales August 4 is on average the wettest day of the month, after which it gets steadily drier.

So until things improve, for British holidaymakers it’s the traditional pastime of cowering in shops, cafes and seaside shelters as the heavens open, cursing gently so the children can’t hear — and then pointing at a distant fissure of blue in the sky and announcing: ‘Oh look, I think it’s cheering up over there . . .’