Wonderful/terrible/bad/good/odd weather we’re having today! [Please delete as appropriate]

As my friend pointed out, England is one of the few places you can properly discuss the weather. You find, in other countries, the weather is always predictably hot, predictably cold, or predictably wet. In England, we are genuinely shocked when we have more than a day or two's worth of sun or if we get an amount of snow which is actually enough to make a snowman bigger than a football.

In England, it is not the range, but how we lack extremes in the weather which makes us want to go on to holiday! With rain, we don't always get much at once, but it does always seem to be raining constantly. A drought in England is a great shock and even when one is officially announced, we never take it particularly seriously. We know autumn will most likely make up for where summer lacked.

There is always someone moaning about the weather. In the summer there's a lack of sun for a tan, a lack of water for plants (if you're a gardener like my mum!) Even if there is sun we moan that it's too hot to do anything! Autumn brings rain which evokes grumbling about the impossibility of functioning in trousers soaked up to the knees. Furthermore, umbrellas are no good at this time of the year because it will, undoubtedly, be too windy to use it without breakages or a re-enactment of Mary Poppins. Winter is too cold, or no snow. Instead we tend to just get even more rain! Spring generally brings the same mix of wetness, coldness and windiness but at least there is the warmer summer to look forwards too. And more recently, we've enjoyed the possibility of a freak pile of snow around Easter time. Nevertheless, when summer eventually decides to show itself, the sunny times seem to choose to appear in late May to June time. This is just not fair because it leaves us students sitting in exam halls and classrooms gazing longingly out the window at the sun we can only get an hour of at lunch. Without a doubt, as soon as the final bell for summer rings, clouds will come rolling in, ready to set us off moaning again.

At the moment, we are having an unreasonable amount of rain. We've had so much that Cumbria (whose name I managed to muddle with Columbia...) was flooded and there was even a major bridge washed away. My house even ended up developing a moat which is just not right! Vast amounts of rain should not require me to use a boat to get from my front door to the car. To be honest, I wouldn't mind so much if I had the right sort of house to go with it, but I think I've been short changed: What happened to the turrets, the large rooms, and the handsome princes that normally come with a moat?

Unfortunately, this is the curse of living in a country whose weather system and seasons thrive on a diet of teenage mood swings. Today it was raining one minute then bright sunshine the next! Maybe someday I'll move to a country with a more predictable weather pattern... or maybe I'll just be English: I'll put up with it and just moan!