Isn’t it a lovely day (to go out in the rain)?

Weather. It’s no respecter of wealth and status. It can’t be used to bribe the electorate. It refuses to be pinned down from one day to the next. I know. It’s such a cliché – Brits talking about the weather – and believe me, most of the time I point blank refuse to discuss it. There are people close to me – you know who you are – who regularly torture themselves with weather forecasts. I, on the other hand, glaze over at the first mention of depressions or six-month heatwaves starting on Tuesday fortnight. Even when I actively try to listen to weather forecasts on the radio, I can guarantee I’ve zoned out before they reach the east of England. But that’s not because of any indifference to the weather on my part. I love weather. I just don’t want to know what it’s meant to be doing today or in a week’s time. I’m not heading out in a fishing boat any time soon. I don’t have crops or livestock to protect. And there is little risk of flooding or hurricanes where I live and travel to. Really – I can afford to take the risk of getting caught in torrential rain or, as happened recently, facing four days of glorious sunshine in the Yorkshire Dales (which, I am told, hadn’t been forecast) with no sunblock and a suitcase of thermals and woolly garments.

The thing is I like the weather’s surprises and mischief. I like its unpredictability. In most other areas of my life, I’d prefer certainty. One of the reasons I do improv is to get better at uncertainty. The only thing that you can be sure of in an improv scene is that it will start and, at some point, end. Like life. But for some reason, I find the uncertainty of the weather strangely thrilling. It helps that there’s not really any weather I actively don’t like. As someone said, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing – and anyway, none of it seems to hang around for long. The day after I left Yorkshire it rained. Last week I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. This morning there was fog and the central heating was back on.

In my hazy memory weather did seem to behave better and stick to proper seasons when I was a child. They didn’t need a roof at Wimbledon. White Christmases were more than just a dream. Small creatures knew when to hibernate and when to wake up again. So, yes, I am concerned that our unpredictable climate might have more than a little to do with our reckless treatment of the ozone layer. But I also like to think it’s down to meteorological sheer bloody mindedness.

As I finish writing this, the sun is blazing down out of a cloudless sky. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.