This week we have had a taste of what might been during the kids Summer holidays as the blues skies returned and the sun shone over Hampshire for the first time in several weeks, but the cool misty Autumnal skies over Basingstoke this morning gave a taster for what is to come in the coming months. Quite why we still have the kids holidays in August is beyond me as it is often turbulent and wet, and this year has been worse than we normally have.

Statistics show that August was our coolest since 1993, our fourth dullest since records began. It also featured double the amount of average rainfall, in fact many areas in the south and east suffered their third highest rainfall total ever, that’s pretty depressing stuff when all you have to look forward to is Autumn and Winter.

When you speak to people, memories are pretty short, as this summer is being regarded as “Summer….what summer?” This theory is is based on the weather since the last week in July which was essentially the time when the Azores High collapsed under the weight of the Jet Stream, but if you look prior to that, after a cold winter, southern Britain was pretty much bathed in sunshine from April to mid July. Remember Wimbledon fortnight? Not one drop of rain, in fact if the school holidays had been in June and the first fortnight of July, we would all be remembering a great Summer of camping, and trips to the seaside.

The summer holidays are apparently in August because in past times children used to help the families with the harvest of the crops before returning to school. That’s fair enough, but children don’t do that anymore as far as I know, so why do we have to continue to have Summer holidays in the month when Autumn shows its first hand. In August the nights are getting cooler, damper, and shorter, and the weather systems in the Atlantic are more turbulent, so there is really no justification for it as far as I can see.

The forecast for this weekend looks good, so I am going to try my best to enjoy it by playing cricket, and getting out and about, it may be our last good one for some time.

Enjoy

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