After a brief but uninvolving flirtation with contentment, the man standing, with a guilty look on his face, squarely behind the hedgehog has reverted to type.

First there is what some allegedly qualified weather lunatics are referring to as summer. These are the very same nutters who predicted an arid, water starved landscape under unbroken sunshine after three hot days in April. I cannot watch my license fee being wasted on yet another fancy graphic showing a world of wet without shouting “bloody charlatans, bring back Wincy Willis”

Take Monday morning for example. A smiling, well dressed cipher of the Grim Reaper bounces onto the weather stage and declares cheerfully “if you live in Yorkshire, there’s a good chance that an entire years rainfall will fall in a single day” without adding “OH MY GOD, FIRE AND BRIMSTONE, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, WE’RE ALL DOOOOOMED I TELL YOU“. Still,at least, other publicly funded bodies took it a bit more seriously with Hull, for example, declaring a state of emergency. Still this could be for almost anything really, such as “I’m sorry the architecture is so poor and the smell of fish so overwhelming, we’re declaring martial law”

And we need this kind of nannying because people are idiots. Take this guy for example, did he think his car was in fact a boat? Could he have imagined that when the water is above the roofline, some loss of steering might occur? Down here in the soft south, we’ve had consecutive rain on twenty one days but no more than a shower compared to the poor buggers up north. However, it’s still bloody annoying as the longest day has been and gone; but it’s hard to find something fun to do on light evenings when the cat is being blown around the garden, and the lawn is below the water table.

In other bad news, it appears the finest medical minds that seven years of hard partying at med school can create, have deemed it necessary to put my dodgy shoulder under the knife. This exploratory surgery will not actually fix the problem but may give them some clue to why, five months after I monged it, complex muscular actions such as putting on a shirt still make me want to blubber. For reasons I don’t really understand, this is the only options short of amputation and it’s six weeks off the bike at best. Right then, that can wait until winter.

Wimbledon has started and almost ended for any British competitor. Good ol’ Tim somehow made it to the second round but you feel the third may be somewhat beyond him. So pissed off am I with it all, I’m leaving the country to ply my dodgy vocational trade in Canada for a week. However, looking at the forecast for Ottawa, it appears I’m taking most of this crappy weather with me.

However, I’ll make absolutely sure that I leave you some. It’s no fun being grumpy on your own.