As our international readers will know, the European summer was caricatured by certain news outlets as a pre-apocalyptic hellscape with soaring temperatures and wildfires raging out of control. Certainly, there was some truth in this; on the Continent, the thermometers definitely got a run for their money, and friends of mine were stranded on Sicily for a few days while Catania airport was brought back into service.
The one place where the narrative didn’t hold, naturally, was in the United Kingdom. For complicated reasons best known to the meteorologists, the heat on the other side of the English Channel meant that we got all the moisture. And so it rained, rained again, and then rained some more.
