Are our expectations of the weather unrealistic?

No, this usually happens at least a week or two after the weather has changed, when we are absolutely sure the sunbathing days are upon us and a trip out west will not be a waste of time.

And it’s not even the pleasant and ever so continental spectacle of a packed al fresco dining area, as we eat and drink outside all year round, even when it requires donning a thermal vest and five extra layers.

No, you know without a doubt and with cast iron 100% confidence that summer is here when you see a rough-looking and usually quite scrawny bloke bouncing down King Street, naked from the waist up, with his rolled-up T-shirt hanging out of his jeans.

This usually happens in late May or early June. Last year I spotted one freakishly early in March, during that little heatwave, when the Island was officially in a drought and Jersey Water was talking about hosepipe bans.

I haven’t seen one this year. So summer has not arrived. Not that any of us needed telling. It started raining last April and soon we were in the wettest drought since records began.

Last summer never happened and this year’s spring was bullied out of the way by winter.

And so when the UK Met Office last week called a summit of leading scientists in the hope of finding out what on earth was going on with our weather, many hoped they would, quite literally, offer us a glimmer of sunshine.

Instead they warned that this run of disappointing summers could last for another ten years.

The culprits were identified as the north Atlantic (which is going through a cyclical warming phase) and the jet stream (a conveyor belt of winds driving storms around the globe) which has got itself into a bit of a mood with the changing sea temperature, packed its bags and headed off south, leaving us is an unusually cool and wet air flow.

This same phenomenon was apparently responsible for a run of wet summers in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

But I couldn’t help but ask myself two questions after reading the coverage of this summit last week: Should we be disappointed with this news? And why do we need to know?

We are in a recession. I have come to the conclusion that my football team will be in League One for the rest of my days and my wife has started playing the new Michael Bublé album in the house. So the last thing I need to hear right now is that I could be 42 years old the next time I experience a proper summer.

At any rate, it’s not that our summers really are that bad. They are just a little worse than they should be at the moment and, more importantly, much worse than we expect them to be. And there lies the problem.

Rose-tinted spectacles and Ryanair have left us with an unrealistic expectation of a British summer.

We remember our school summer holidays as six weeks of wall-to-wall sunshine, not because it was actually like that, but because, with nothing else to do, we could pick our days to be outside. We remember the warm afternoons kicking a ball around the garden and forget the hours and hours we spent stuck inside watching Fun House and re-runs of Sheffield United’s epic rise into the old First Division in the legendary 1989/90 campaign.

But now we are all grown up we can have fantastic weather Monday to Friday while we are stuck behind a desk and endure a wet weekend and look back on the week as another disappointment even though in reality it was rather nice.

And then there are those warm summer holidays abroad which make us all believe we will get the same treatment when we return home. But, just like a Costa del Sol beach or a French public toilet, it always turns out to be a great big disappointment.

So, instead of bemoaning this unusually cool and wet weather, why can’t we just make the most of what we have? We still get sunny and warm days (and this week is shaping up quite nicely), but just not as many as before.

Even our freezing winter fell way short of smashing the record coldest temperature of -10.3°C set on the night of 5 January 1894 or the coldest daytime maximum of -6.1°C set on 12 January 1987. And the recent series of cooler and wetter summers have still treated us to a few weeks of genuinely nice weather along the way.

And even if it is not that nice, we live in a great place to make the most of what we have. As we are an Island, there is always somewhere that is sheltered from the wind. And we don’t have to be baking in continental heat to get out and about.

The north coast in 16°C and a force six wind is still pretty nice, as is one of our sheltered beaches. Tourists never seem too stuck for things to do either. One couple even stopped me on a cool and windy day last week and asked for directions to the Steam Clock. I smiled and sent them on their way, bless them.

The problem is that it has to be 25°C and clear blue skies for some Islanders to step outside. Anything less than this and they sit around moping and complaining that the weather used to be so much better. So perhaps if we just lower our standards the weather will give us all much less to moan about.

On the bright side, none of us are going to struggle to strike up conversations with strangers for at least the next decade. Co-op checkout staff will still be able to pass the time by commenting on the drizzle, Islanders loitering at bus stops will bemoan the icy wind and business people will still be able to use weather-based chat as a pre-meeting ice-breaker.

And it may be that hundreds of rough-looking and quite scrawny blokes will spend much of this summer hovering tentatively at their front door, just waiting for their moment to swagger off to King Street to force their tattoos and chest hair on unsuspecting shoppers and office staff. But so be it.

That’s just the unpredictable British weather for you. It may be a little wetter and a little cooler than we like at the moment, but it’s not something to moan about.

Richard Heath

The thing is, you don’t actually need clear blue skies and Mediterranean temperatures to enjoy life in Jersey, just a sunny disposition.