The rain in... the UK

While I'm a Kiwi born and bred, I'm also lucky enough to hold a UK passport (thankfully, also an EU passport), which means I like to keep an eye on what's happening back in Blighty.

If you haven't been keeping up with UK weather reports (a Kiwi obsession - the weather), then here's something you'll already probably know from those stereotypes of pommy weather conditions - it's raining - a heck of a lot.

I first arrived in the UK in the summer of 1989 (with two sea bags, a sextant and 34 pounds sterling in my pocket, fresh from the Auckland-Fukuoka yacht race). I cooked. It was one of the hottest summers on record. Subsequent summers were more typical - a couple of days of warm sun, and then we all would say to each other over a healthy drink of Pimms, "well, then, if that's summer, we've had it."

This summer, due to the combination of warm moist air, the much lower position of the Atlantic jet stream and the fact that the storms have been relatively slow to move away, has meant that the rain in Spain is not falling on the Iberian plain.

If you'd like to see some more photos of the flooding, here's your spot. The shot above is Louise Beale's from Fenny Compton: "We had to collect our children from school in our racing hovercraft, as all the roads into and out of the village were blocked."