Dripdripdrop little April showers

This is becoming ridiculous. It has been raining here for three months. I'm completely serious. There has not been ONE single sunny day where it was just sunny and nice and warm. We've had humid and overcast and warm, and pissing-down-rain overcast and warm, and torrential downpour with sunbreaks (and this is the only other place in the world, besides the North-West, where that word comes up in actual conversation), and warm and sunny before noon and then grey and drizzly after noon, and, my personal favourite, that week in early June that was so cold and rainy I actually considered breaking my black wool overcoat out from winter storage because it was just that cold.

And now they're saying that we'll have more of it.

The only way that I can survive winter in this country, in this city where everything is a shade of grey and only the buses and telephone boxes have colour, is the summer. For the last five years, it has been beautiful. Last summer, London languished under blue skies for months. It was so hot on the tube people were fainting. Summer in England is really like those old paintings - hazy, with people on rivers in boats or sheep eating grass under huge spreading trees in fields. It's sitting in a park, eating an ice-lolly, or trying desperately to find the one pub with both an outdoor space to sit AND good beer.

This horrible, crap weather that does not end - it's not summer. And it needs to go away, because if it doesn't I don't know if I can survive the winter this year.