Good grief, but this wet weather is awful. The sodding rain is relentless. I’m supposed to be gathering sunny images for my book so it’s profoundly dispiriting to open up online weather forecasts and see predictions of more of the same glum conditions ten days ahead.
I am not alone in this depression about depressions — several sporting events have been impacted (attendance at Wimbledon on Friday last week was the lowest for day five of the Grand Slam tournament in 25 years), and the UK holiday industry will be suffering hugely, and it must be awful to have spent months organising an outdoors-focussed July wedding expecting glorious weather and then to face such a damp squib instead.
Until just a few days ago, I’d been lucky — I’d managed to fly the DJI drone in most of the spots I’d planned to fly it, and by donning my orange Rab jacket, I added a splash of color to the images to compensate for the lack of sunshine.
Then my luck ran out. Bivvying at a specific scenic spot to capture a dawn shot of the beautiful summer vista was going to be a literal wash-out, so I took the train home to Newcastle instead, hoping for an improvement in the weather.
I’m not going to get any such improvement but I have a schedule to hit — including giving a talk at the CycleCity conference in Leicester about my 1930s cycle tracks project — so it looks like I’ll be riding some long distances in the pouring rain. Grim. Grim. Grim.
Surely the weather’s going to break for the better soon?
I appreciate I’m moaning about “weather” and not “climate,” but it’s inescapable that such a long spell of rain (indeed, approaching the 50 days of rain anticipated by the usually wrong tabloids at the end of May) is so unseasonal as to be worthy of inclusion in the increase-in-weird-weather events long predicted by climate scientists.
