British Weather

"Other countries have a climate; in England we have weather." This statement, often made by Englishmen to describe the special meteorological conditions of their country, is both typical of the English and true. In no country other than England can one experi­ence four seasons in the course of a single day! Day may break as a mild spring morning; an hour or so later black clouds may have ap­peared from nowhere and the rain may be pouring down. At midday conditions may be really wintry with the temperature down by about fifteen degrees. And then, in the late afternoon, the sky will clear, the sun will begin to shine and for an hour or two before dark­ness falls, it will be summer.

The problem is that we never can be sure which of the different types of weather we will find. Not only do we get several different sorts of weather in one day, but we may very well get a spell of win­ter in summer and vice versa. The foreigner may laugh when he sees the Englishman setting forth on a brilliantly sunny morning wearing a raincoat and carrying an umbrella, but he may well regret his laughter later in the day! And, of course, the weather's variety pro­vides a constant topic of conversation, and you must be good at dis­cussing the weather.

(Extract from "Modern English I for Teacher Students" by G. Graustein)