A Change in the Weather; UK in Chaos
They say that one of the key topics of gossip in the UK is the weather. To some degree it is unoffensive so can be the basis for discussion between strangers (though saying this, the rise of bigotry in the UK shown by the known industrial unrest in the UK against foreign workers, seems to make people think that condemning immigrants is also an acceptable keynote these days!). The other thing is that British weather varies quite considerably. This stems from the fact that the UK is on the rim of a vast ocean yet has warm currents coming up from the Gulf of Mexico which moderate the fact that we are next to a large continent (muscular land masses tend to have wider extremes of climate both hot and cold, in any year) and get weather systems coming from the Arctic, Scandinavia and Russia but also from both northern and southern Europe and also sometimes North Africa. Thus the British Isles are a junction place of lots of climatic occurrences which means the weather is particularly unpredictable even when compared to neighbouring countries on the continent. Britain (i.e. UK without Northern Ireland) get more extremes than say the Republic of Ireland where you can certain and average of +6ВєC throughout the winter, the temperature that needs to be maintained for grass to keep growing. We tend to have mild summers and equable winters.
In recent years in particular snow has been far less common than in my youth which has led to a shift in some seasonal patterns of plants and animals. We do have some wet summers whereas in the 1970s it was dry summers, and yet even when we have had sore rainfall, some areas like Kent in South-East England have had water shortages (though a lot of that is to do with how greedy and bad at their job utility companies are). There are high regions in the UK which get more snow, but the bulk of the UK population lives in a broad corridor of land running from London North-West to Manchester. There are some uplands in that cincture,...
