Is this the worst (britishes) summer ever?

thats a shitty thing to say.

will no-one think of the aging mod tards?

How's the Hackney Weekend holding up? Holding a festival on a fucking marsh never seemed like the most sensible of ideas.

h8 the way the festival's encroaching on one of the most unspoiled areas round here as if the scorched earth approach to vicky park wasn't enough

no idea how it's going, was out of london yesterday, hopefully it's so muddy that everyone's put off making it happen again

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18653274

Officially the wettest April-June ever (and June isn't even quite finished yet). Ironically, in the middle of all of this, I managed to get hopelessly sunburnt on Tuesday in London.

I got slightly sunburnt standing at Preston station for 3 hours waiting for a replacement bus service to take us past the floods and landslides and up to Carlisle so I could get to Glasgow. No buses. Taxi to Carlisle, no trains there either. Weather + rail chaos, the most britishest things of all?

This week:
http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r299/crunchydog_2006/rain.jpg
and beyond:
UK Outlook for Sunday 8 Jul 2012 to Tuesday 17 Jul 2012:
The generally unsettled picture is expected to continue throughout the outlook period. Although all areas are prone to showers or longer spells of rain, initially the focus of the most persistent rain is likely to be across central, southern and eastern Britain, while northwestern areas probably escape the worst of the weather. Through the middle of next week, conversely, the wettest conditions look likely to spread to northern and western parts, with some drier and brighter spells in the south and east. Any rain could be heavy and thundery at times. Continuing changeable right through to the middle of July. Most areas becoming breezy after this weekend, especially in northern and western parts, where there is a risk of coastal gales at times. Temperatures often rather cool in rain.

It's so unfair.

fully expecting the government to intervene in advance of the olympics with some sort of secret rain-busting technology,but i'm kind of getting into this cloudforest vibe at the moment. put on some popol vuh, make more coffee, watch the raindrops dripping down from the leaves

i am just acting like it's proper summer. may be going slightly mental.

lay in bed listening to it piss down for much of the early morning, contemplating the strange, non-season weather.

cos basically it sounded like September out there.

It's horribly humid. I wouldn't mind the rain if it had the decency to go for the full autumnal vibe and be cold as well.

Getting kinda disappointed in my BritILX peeps, when the only regular BritILX thread going is complaining about a summer full of rain, which happens like clockwork, every damn year. But no one is debating or saying interesting things or making points about the unholy plague of banking scandals right now, which happen like.... oh.

Never mind.

if it helps I did also lay in bed contemplating the grotesque manipulative greed of the banking system, where absolute moral collapse and widespread systemic criminality is somehow seen as normal, justifiable, free of consequence, which also is indicative of the total separation of those who control financial forces (forces that, like the weather, are everywhere, and affect everyone all the time) and the successive governments that connived in their criminality, from the general populus, ie those for whom a bank is basically a cashpoint and a perspex encased teller.

I woke up quite early.

I was almost going to put an addendum after that post to say "that was a pathetic attempt at a joke, BTW, not a carp or a condemnation" but I thought any joke which needed to be flagged as a joke probably isn't funny.

Rain in June and political/economic scandals, the great inevitables? Probably not funny, I suppose, even for dark humour.

when i was a child the summers were sunnier and the banks were less bent tbh

May and June are normally OK for weather; July and August have been ropey as hell the last few summers though, iirc. This year is just a complete washout though. Two good weeks in March, two in May. I've barely ridden my bike because it's just depressing.

Are these like the fabled sunny British summers of the 80s that I missed while I was out of the country, like the fabled era of Thatcher prosperity?

i seemed to spend a lot more time playing out with my mates than wd be practicable today

it doesn't rain every year, 2010 was awesome. 2009 had a massive heatwave for weeks too.

do ya remember 95 eh, eh?

remember making my confirmation

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r299/crunchydog_2006/summergraph.jpg
How good/bad our summers have been recently AS PROVEN BY SCIENCE!

This looks at a combination of temperatures, rainfall and sunshine hours and how much higher/lower than average they were. A figure of zero means it was pretty normal, anything above means better than normal and below means worse. So 2003 was great, 2005 was good, 2006 was mostly brilliant, the last five summers have been mostly shit (except 2010 started off well) with some spectacularly poor Augusts. This is using data for Heathrow.

we've still got time!

#prayforsummer

three months of record rainfall following seven months of below average rainfall

hmmn

Today was nice. I got a little sunburnt while gardening in Hackney.

today = shit though.

Nice weather for ducks

sense of smugness at having pre-emptively rejected every festival going this weekend :)

yday was nice, lovely evening. you take what you can get now in these end times.

you take what you can get now in these end times

Oh great, looting has started and no-one told me...

the bbc has a 10 day forecast now

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2643743

it looks like much the same as recently, but warmer

hot and wet but not in a good way

oh, i like that average-weather chart down the bottom, that's a neat corrective to fantasy summers past.

oh, i like that average-weather chart down the bottom, that's a neat corrective to fantasy summers past.

Not really - it just proves that this is much worse than actual summers past. That chart says the average rain for June is 45mm. We had well over double that last month. The met office report for June:

The weather was dominated by low pressure over or close to the UK, with associated weather fronts. These brought rather cool days, some very large rainfall totals and also some strong winds early in the month. There was an almost complete absence of warm, settled spells.

The UK mean temperature was 0.3 °C below the 1971-2000 average and it was the coolest June since 1991. Daily maximum temperatures were well below normal, particularly in many central and eastern areas, with few warm days. Almost all areas were much wetter than normal, especially across much of England and Wales, southern and eastern Scotland and Northern Ireland. It was the wettest June across the UK in the series from 1910 (wetter than June 2007), and the equal-wettest June in the England and Wales series from 1766 (shared with June 1860). Only the far north-west of Scotland was drier than normal. Almost all areas were duller than usual, and it was provisionally the second dullest June in the series from 1929.

xp Oh, that must be a London-only thing. The Met office has some nice graphs compared to past averages too:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/anomalygraphs/

I find this thread funny because my personal idea of how summer is different now than during the 80s is p. much the opposite of everyone else's. It may be wet this year but it's still not cold. I find summer too hot these days and don't remember doing so as a kid (admittedly probably because I wasn't quite so fat as a kid).

If we were at primary school now we wouldn't even be considering this the summer - that was basically the six weeks off school, which hasn't even begun yet. Worth bearing in mind next time someone at work starts off on rose tinted reminiscing.

time was we used to learn our timetables in class and not worry about what the temperature was, now its all concept games to learn the real values of integers and how they relate to the physical world around us, just last week the little woman's son from her first marriage was left alone on the beach at rhyl to learn the true meaning of sunburn, wouldn't have happened when i was locked underground by my abusive old dad

I have a really vivid ie possibly inaccurate memory of it raining every single day in June 1990 and being utterly enraged wondering what kind of god would allow this

otoh there were World Cup games every evening so it wasn't a big deal, it was just the PRINCIPLE

IIRC 1990 was a scorching summer but then I was in London/Oxford.

Matt DC - Scottish schools used to break up at the beginning of June and not reconvene until mid-August. No idea whether they still do but they were bumper summers for sure.

that's a neat corrective to fantasy summers past.

Not really - it just proves that this is much worse than actual summers past

um. my point was that it gives us actual summers past to compare to, not whatever imaginary version we hold to (which could be positive or negative).

and that having it right on the page with the forecast means idle curiosity might lead people who, like me, think "well 21 degrees is cold for july" to discover that actually it's not far off the average.

in other news, the Heath was utterly gorgeous yesterday afternoon, and surprisingly uncrowded.

IIRC 1990 was a scorching summer

I remember July/August post-end of term as being really, really hot and sunny and I was filled with resentment because I spent most of the time working in Fads (decorating shop) or having driving lessons.

last evenings london forecast = rain clearing away early in the morning, dry with sunny spells and abt 22c

today irl = like being inside a greenhouse in december

August 1990 saw several places in Scotland have their hottest day on record. I certainly remember Dundee being almost Mediterranean like.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/aug1990/ 37.1C at Cheltenham.

tomorrow according to the Met Office it will be wet and 19c tops.

Fucking tipping it down in Manchester, on and off, for the whole day, mostly when I step out of the office. Going to housewarming BBQ tomorrow, oh daer.