Let’s move our summer holidays to June and end this washout

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. A decade ago, the weathermen promised – or threatened – a radically different kind of British summer in the years to come.

Short periods of intense, tropical downpours, interspersed with spells of searing heat. This is what the climate models said was going to happen.

It looks like those models may need adjusting. For days on end Britain, particularly in the South, has been sluiced with cold, blatting rain, as front after weather front has marched in across the country from the Atlantic, bringing thick, water-laden clouds to dump their load on our green and pleasant land.

No searing tropical heat, no balmy monsoon – just a good old-fashioned August washout.

We normally think of this month as the height of summer. It forms the core of the long school break. But the statistics show that August is, by some way, the worst of the three summer months for those of us who do not wish to hunker down on a rain-lashed Cornish beach, as the Prime Minister and his wife have been doing this week.

The raw figures show that moving the summer holidays would make a great deal of sense. Across the UK, August brings, on average, 3.52 inches of rain. July is considerably drier and sunnier (and just as warm), with 3.07 inches, and June drier still, with 2.88 inches of rain (June is a little cooler, but the days are longer).

August is, in fact, one of the wetter months – even February sees considerably less rain than we get during the “summer” holiday.

This year, we have seen a very typical late-summer pattern. The jet stream currently lies well to the south of the British Isles, meaning that we are right in the firing line of the weather fronts that carry sodden oceanic air in from the Atlantic (during heatwave summers, this rain falls to the north, over Scandinavia).

“It’s too soon to say if it is record-breaking,” says a Met Office spokesman of the rainfall. “But there is no doubt that it is wet.”

In fact, the latter half of August often has far more in common with autumn than summer weather.

So would it be better starting the holidays earlier in the year?

It would make a lot of sense. Beginning the school break in late June would maximise the chances of it coinciding with fine, dry weather, and this would boost the UK tourism industry.

It would, of course, mean that the school year would have to be reorganised, but that is a small price to pay.

Sadly, such a move is unlikely to happen. We British are peculiarly attached to the illogicalities of our calendar. Think of all those bank holidays bunched together in the spring. Or the switch to Greenwich Mean Time in October, which brings gloom across the land. But we stick with it.

Perhaps there is a sense that we believe a wet August is good and proper. There was certainly something very un- British about the Great August Heatwave of 2003, when temperatures nudged 40C (104F) in south-east England.

Cagoules, mould, damp walking boots and soggy sandwiches – that’s what living in Britain is all about – not searing sunshine and air-conditioning.

But not everyone thinks like this, and millions of people head south this month for a sunny holiday, rather than endure the rain at home.

Moving “summer” might persuade them to stay put.