By Philip Eden

People have started moaning about the weather: not the usual grumbles and gripes, but some serious complaining. In other words, flaming June has struck again. Friday afternoon brought thunder, lightning and torrential rain to north Wales and northern England. Heavy downpours led to local flooding around Chester and the Wirral, across the central Pennines including the Skipton and Settle districts, and in the Vale of York especially around Northallerton. At nearby Leeming an inch of rain fell, most of it in two hours.

But the moaning has increased in volume, not in response to a single day's bad weather, but rather because of the prolonged period of very disturbed weather which has now lasted for four weeks. Except for two fine days at the start of the Jubilee bank holiday weekend it has rained almost daily since the middle of May over a large part of the country, and sunshine has been in short supply too, especially during the last two weeks.

Averaged over England and Wales, we have notched up 117mm of rain between mid-May and mid-June, and that is 78 per cent above the long-term average. At Shap in Cumbria there has been exactly 300mm of rain in the last thirty days. During the same period the sun has shone for just 160 hours which is barely three-quarters of the normal amount. The only part of the country to score low on rainfall and high on sunshine since the middle of May has been northeast Scotland.

Horrendous though those statistics are, they are far from breaking any records. Early summer can be a cold and waterlogged season, and the statistics show that 2000, 1986, 1984, 1983, 1981 and 1979 were even wetter and even duller (in the sense of a shortage of sunshine) in late-May and early-June than this year has been. Notice, however, the absence of poor ones in the 1990s - we have actually been spoilt in the last 15 years with a substantial number of warm and sunny Mays.

The one question people always ask me when the weather is as bad as this in late-spring and early-summer: what will the rest of the summer be like? This week has already brought a rise in temperature, but the statistics, as ever, are equivocal. However, there have been enough occasions when wet Mays and Junes have been followed by warm and sunny Julys and Augusts (including 1981, 1983 and 1984 in the list above) to raise our hopes this year.

(c) 2002 Philip Eden