An ode to the good old-fashioned British weather | Jack Marshall's column

British weather is internationally famous for being bad. We do drizzle like it’s going out of fashion - American comedian Marc Maron once said that the rain in the North West of England was the saddest he’d ever seen - and it’s probably fair to say that, even when we have good weather, we can’t get it quite right.

While the Spanish lol about in airy, shady apartments where everything is tiled and cool and the Italians float about on Vespas dressed in linen, we sit in the rain under leaden skies for four fifths of the year until the sun comes blaring out and hotboxes us in our carpeted homes, stewing us in a barbeque of insulation, leather sofas, sleepless nights, and aggressive pollen counts.

There are maybe two to five days a year when we hit that golden sweet spot of about 23°C with a light breeze, sight of the sun, and air which is preferably more oxygen than water. Mostly, it’s either cold, windy, wet, dark, or all of the above. And then, even when we finally pluck up the meteorological courage to get continental, we lurch aggressively towards a 29°C so viscous that any wind hits you like a fart in a bath.

At this point, it’s probably important to turn to that classic truism to point out that our damp forecasts give us the lovely greens we see everywhere, whilst also pointing out that our weather is only underwhelming to people who really, really like that golden corridor of climactic perfection.

People who like the rain? Fill your boots (literally, it’s coming down in sheets out there). People who like moody, wind-torn cliff-sides and sea-spray so corrosive it erodes plastic? Crack on, North Wales is that way. People who like skies so monochrome that it’s like living inside a ping-pong ball? I mean, fair play; whatever floats your boat.

And as much as the British weather may never be perfect for me, I can seek solace in the fact that I heartily partake in that other most British of things: moaning about it.