The last time I can remember having a summer like the one still in progress was, I think, in 1976.
That was the year I did my A-levels, and the year when I went on to be an undergraduate in Southampton.
It was a long, very hot, very dry summer of the sort we have now endured, although back then no one was worrying much about climate change or the damage it might cause.
This came up in a conversation I had yesterday, and I provided a little anecdote from that same year.
During my first 10-week term in Southampton, from late September to early December 1976, it rained every day, as I recall. In retrospect, the best purchase I made that term was not a copy of Keynes' General Theory, which I still have. Instead, it was an umbrella. I used that umbrella constantly on my journey from my hall of residence to the campus, and it was much more useful and necessary at the time.
I am not forecasting a very wet autumn. I am just relating an experience, coupled with a note of caution.
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Everyone, and all businesses, need a plan for dealing with the impacts of climate change. Vulnerable people, businesses and other organisations need help to develop and implement their plan. The long term 1.5°C threshold will in all likelihood be breached over the next few years, and temperatures will continue to climb. The impacts are big and wide ranging. We can no longer assume that our lives will continue unchanged. They won’t.
Agreed
I was on the Isle of White camping – it was really hot and the island was worrying about fresh water. I wonder what they did to improve anything back then? Treat is an aberration? We were talking about pollution in science classes back then too.
One of the best parts of the trip was the overnight summer timetabled train from Nottingham down to the south coast port. They don’t seem to run them anymore.
Summer services disappeared when the excess capacity they required was treated as uneconomic. We spent a fortune on motorways instead.
Interestingly, I had a similar experience when I joined Southampton as a post grad in 1982. Both 1976 and 1982 were el Nino years, as is this one.
You get it
Over the last 50 years or so, the world has been in el nino conditions for between a quarter and a third of the time. They are a normal part of planet Earth’s weather pattern. But now we, quite rightly, fear them. Join the dots everyone.
May 26th 1976 also saw frost in north London. It was my parents’ silver wedding party and very cold. As my mother often said, “there wasn’t a runner bean to be had for love nor money” that year.
PS The appointment of Dennis Howell as minister for drought is the most effective in history.
🙂
I think it snowed in Ipswich in late May
It may have been hail
I recall it as snow.
The Met Office appears to agree with you.
“El Niño could put the UK at greater risk of a wet, stormy autumn with signs of a very unsettled spell already showing up in long-range forecasts.”
You have been warned!
I am sailing back across the Biscay and up the channel to Ipswich in September. I hope you are wrong….. but I am prepared.
Batten down the hatches….
Take in a reef
I’ve already put my Regatta fold-up storm jacket in my rucksack.
And BTW, in May 1976 a friend had a Triumph Vitesse on which the heater was not working in freezing weather. He had to drive up to Blackpool so I fixed the valve so that it was permanently open. Literally a few days later he drove back in searing heat with the heater still on!
🙂
How about an Umbrella with Keynes General Theory printed on it?
The suggestion seems to be that the outlook for El Nino is what I might call ‘Interesting’ or as Slartiblartfast put it in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
‘I dont know about you but it scares me fartless’
Agreed
1976 is often stated as the year when the UK achieved the highest level of equality. Since then, it’s been all down hill
I also turned 18 and left school that summer. I can’t remember which week it was but my then girlfriend I managed to go camping when it rained. But I can’t remember a single camping holiday in England or Wales during my entire teenage years or early 20s when it didn’t rain. Except one weekend in Cumbria…..when it snowed.
I can …. it really did not rain all the time
Do you still have the umbrella?
I still have a FULTON umbrella I purchased in September 2000 in London!
No! Long gone.
Keynes survives….
I’m back in the UK until mid September and my trusty 20 year old + FULTON is in the boot
I was married in London on Saturday August 28th 1976 (Golden Wedding next week). A marquee was erected in the garden which we all thought quite unnecessary. But on the Thursday the weather broke and on the Saturday we had torrential rain, so we were grateful for it in the end.
Congratulations!
I was on community work placement in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, which was bloody hot. My supervisor wasn’t interested as I wouldn’t join Militant. I ate lots of curry! My then girlfriend and I drove to a folk festival, and left when the weather broke. So did my trusty Wolseley 1660. By Xmas she’d dumped me. Great year, nope. But not in the same league as this summer IMO.
Like you, I also completed my A Levels, before, in my case, heading off to Leeds University, to study Fuel and Combustion Science.
I was also , at the age of 18, along with nine others from the local comp responsible for saving the local cricket club from going under. As a group of seventeen year olds, the previous summer we had formed the second team, only to see all but two of the first team to leave, we found ourselves running the club! We then lost the ground over the winter!
So 1976, saw us running a club in an adult league with no ground when the season started. By the end of the season we had a new ground and won two cups, including the Robert Dunett Cup, which by coincidence, we won again today, for the first time in 50 years!
It was a summer to remember, but not just for the weather.
Good one!
During the 1976 hosepipe ban, an American neighbour continued defiantly to use hers, while the rest of us complied. Her reasoning was that she was paying for it and therefore was entitled to it. Ours was that it was a shared community resource which we needed to treat responsibly. It wasn’t till years later that I realised that she’d come from privatised water in the US, so she saw it as a commodity to be purchased rather than a service. Back then, we’d have thought that privatising water was theft, and been both outraged and incredulous. I am still outraged.