Britons’ Dry Wit Sags Amid Record Rains

Put two Britons within shouting distance of each other, and they will begin to discuss the weather as if there was something new, unusual and vastly interesting about habitual rain.

Day after day, television forecasters here point to milky aerial maps and predict more showers. Taxi drivers turn on their windshield wipers and wax nostalgic about sunnier times, like grandmothers recalling an age when children had good manners. Scarcely a postcard, telephone call or greeting between neighbors escapes talk of the predictably gray and wet weather.

Well, now Britons really have some weather to talk about.

There is average, everyday British rain, and then there is this season’s rain. Endless downpours. Industrial quantities of rain. Exactly 52.61 inches of rain for the 12 months ended March 31--at least 45% above the soggy average. The heaviest rainfall on the island since record keeping began in 1727.

Or worse.

“Rainfall in England is the heaviest since Tudor times,” said a headline in the Independent newspaper, harking back to the era of Henry VIII. According to a statistical analysis by a leading meteorologist, the article said, it could not have rained so much in 500 years.

Presumably that means it will not rain as hard for another 500 years, which would be good news for sun worshipers but not so for Britons who seem to revel in their newly justified weather misery.

“What global warming?” they mutter into the collars of their damp Burberry raincoats.

“Well, I did my part, I’ve been using aerosol spray for years,” said hairdresser Edwina Durbridge. “I expect some rays back.”

Not this week, according to the BBC’s weather report:

“Tuesday . . . rain in the south will spread to most of England and Wales and parts of Northern Ireland during the day. Brighter, showery weather reaching the south later.

“Tuesday night, rain in central areas reaching southern and eastern Scotland.”

And the outlook for today: “Area of rain lying from Northern Ireland to southern and eastern Scotland turning more patchy and lighter. Sunny spells and showers elsewhere, some heavy with thunder and hail and prolonged in south.”

Sunshine almost always comes in “spells,” sudden flashes of light between cold bursts of rain, a sort of meteorological menopause.

This fact is not lost on the Thomas Cook travel company, which on Tuesday ran a one-line advertisement over the weather report in the daily newspaper Metro: “IT’S TIME TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY.”

Few would disagree. A record 2 million Britons fled to sunnier climes during the Easter holiday rather than trudge through the British countryside in mud up to the rim of their rubber Wellington boots. Unfortunately for newspaper columnist Peter Preston of the Guardian, he was not among them.

“This pulsating dispatch comes to you from a natural front line, from Manchester. It is raining (as it has been for most of the past three months). It is raining in the Peak District and the Lake District. It is cold and it is miserable,” Preston wrote.

Foot-and-mouth disease was falsely blamed for scaring off tourists, he said. Despite their endless talk of weather, Britons are in denial.

“Our weather is lousy, our footpaths--closed or open--are quagmires. None but the hardy few would, in any case, be venturing out through this frigid murk,” he said. “Why on Earth should anyone desert Los Angeles (17 Celsius and sunny) for this? Or Washington (23C)? Or New York (18C)? Why on Earth stay here if you can get to Malaga?”

Those left behind grind their teeth over the chipper postcards from friends gone abroad.

“83 degrees [Fahrenheit] and soaring--am I pining for England? No,” Chris Stotesbury wrote from New Orleans.

Just how bad is it back in Britain?

So wet the white cliffs of Dover are collapsing into the coastline, 100,000 tons at a time. So rainy the River Thames has grown in length at its source by nearly a mile, reports the Sunday Telegraph. So cold the newborn penguins at a Yorkshire zoo have to be wrapped in woolly blankets. So generally awful that garden furniture is on sale at end-of-season prices--20% off.

Pretty bad, said Independent newspaper columnist John Walsh.

“I was on a railway platform in the North last week and suddenly someone screamed, ‘That’s it, that’s it. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m going to North Africa or to Dubai, I’m going for good.’ And then someone else said, you know, ‘Maureen, pull yourself together.’ ”

In a country whose poets tend to project romantic emotions onto the landscape, drenched London has become a metaphor for depression, with fewer than 70 hours of sunshine last month--about half the March average.

“People look around and think the entire city is weeping, that it has kept its emotions all bottled up and is having a good cry that will not cease until August,” Walsh said.

In such a sad downpour, many Britons have abandoned their traditional optimism about the weather. Rather than casting eyes skyward and saying, “Looks like it will clear up,” as they usually do, they stand speechless in the rain with water dripping pathetically down their noses.

“People don’t even bother with umbrellas anymore, they just slosh around in the rain looking like wet gun dogs,” Walsh said.