by “When April was with its sweet showers”, wrote Chaucer. “April is the cruelest month,” said TS Eliot.
April can go back to where it came from, I suggest.
After the winter we’ve just had – and, to be honest, autumn, and what passes for early spring – the last thing anyone wants is a “traditional April”.
But is it really true? According to the Met Office, December is the wettest month of the year with a 1991-2020 average of 127.19mm. April averaged 71.73mm over the same period.
I’ve always suspected that “April showers” are wishful thinking. Let’s hope – against hope – that the rain will stop soon and not become a perma-drizzle. Also, we stay inside in December because it’s supposed to be gloomy. Longer, lighter days and flowers draw us outside now – and it doesn’t matter if the weather doesn’t meet our expectations.
We specialize in indirection and euphemism in the UK, especially when it comes to precipitation. “Unsettled” is forecaster-speak for rain. “Changeable” means rain, eventually. “Unstable” means rain, as does “low pressure” or “complex” or – by summer – “unseasonal”.
There are many other exciting words in the English dictionary: mizzle, smirr, downpour, spitting, chucking, slinging, throwing down. Welsh has at least 25 words of its own. A shower? What about flist, pilmer, haster, haud, plash, perry, land-lash, and blast gosling?
Is this word destruction anything but rain-weary Brits trying to make the best of a bad thing?
“It was cool and damp,” notes Paul Theroux, boarding the train to go around the entire coast of Wales in The Kingdom by the Sea (1983). “The weather forecast was ‘scattered showers’ – it was the forecast for Britain almost every day of the year.”
Did we invent all the near synonyms to make the rain more interesting? Or less irritating, at least?
Ducks, droughts and gardens aside, rain is generally understood to be bad weather. It makes outdoor activities unpleasant or unviable. Not the cracked, sweaty waterproof clothing or the brolly inside which is easy to lose as was the trudging with his head bowing towards the floor. The very posture of existential despair. Bow too long and the rain pours down the back of your neck. You live without seeing the world; rain-blindness. I bet the Icelandic has a word for that.
Rain killed the Great British Holiday. “There is no rain in Portugal,” declares a 1954 publicity bill. “But tourists are pouring in.” We were all caught up with posters promising Sunny Devon and Suffolk for Sunshine; there were even sunny cartoons of Aberdeenshire. From the seventies onwards, people exchanged summer showers for some sunshine in Spain and Greece.
The Lake District requires constant refills. An average of 16mm of rain fell each day in February 2020, the highest monthly washout on record (and it was a leap year). Fell walking in the constant rain seems masochistic. But, when I look back on my earliest independent adventures – hitchhiking trips from a town near St Helens to “wild campsites” (ie rich people’s gardens) in the Lakes – I remember the experience of duration, including breaking camp at night due to flooding, with enormous respect.
The west is, famously, wettest. That upper corner, from Ulster to the West Highlands, is almost always hidden behind the mass of blue bubbles on TV forecasts. However, the most remarkable thing is the competition between places in the UK that claim to receive the most rain. The internet is intertwined with them, from Seathwaite in Cumbria to Ballymartin in Dorset to Fort William to places all over Wales – including Cardiff, Crymych, Capel Curig and Eaglaiswrw. I can confirm that the northern half of Wales is wet; all my family holidays were in Rhyl, Prestatyn, Colwyn Bay and Llandullas; I remember static caravans with views of the shore – the windows trickling down and smeared with rain.
The Met Office website has a useful map of the rainiest places. Dartmoor, mostly in Wales and western Scotland, has dark blue patches – meaning it fell by more than four meters a year on average between 1981-2010. The Pennines and all other high places are violet – the next category down. Extreme statistics are also given, showing that Ballymartin had more rain than any other town ever in one day in 1955, and that Crib Goch received the most snow in a month, in 2015.
Preston had the wettest five minutes on record – 32mm on 10th August 1893. Monsoon showers seem to be more frequent now, which could be due to climate change or, equally, my imagination.
But why would the competition be wetter – and why does the Met Office know we’d all be put off if we didn’t know who got soaked the most, most often, and what time of year it was worst in such a place?
Is it weather-romanticism? The rain transforms a simple scenery into something beautiful. See Simon Buckley’s photograph of Manchester’s Dean Gate in the rain for evidence of the transformative power of rain.
But maybe it’s deeper than that. Melissa Harrison, who has written an entire book on the subject, notes that we instinctively respond to the feeling of rain on our skin, and seeing it revive streams and “baptize” dry soil. She comes closer to the meaning of rain when she says: “And there is something else that brings us rain; something deeper and more mysterious, about memory, and nostalgia, and a pleasant kind of melancholy.”
We are fickle, fickle and sometimes miserable people. Rain on our journey makes us think that our troubled mind is a part of nature.
It defines this country more than any other type of weather. It is our identity, our home, our childhood fun and our first holidays. Once, we could not fly and escape from it; In the spring of 2024, which looks fine, we may have to renew our relationship with the rain. Let it come down! Let it pour!
Is Britain really that rainy compared to other countries?
Colombia and Brunei are battling it out for the title of wettest country in the world. Of course regional variations mean it’s not wet all the time. López de Micay in northern Colombia has a reported – and disputed – annual precipitation of 12,892.4 mm (508 in).
According to at least one source, Bergen in Norway has taken the top spot as the rainiest city in Europe. It receives 1,958mm (77.1in) of rain per year, or 163.2mm (6.4in) per month. On average there are 231 days per year with more than 0.1 mm (0.004 in) of rain.
According to Guinness World Records, the place with the highest average annual rainfall is the village of Mawsynram in north-east India, which receives almost 12,000mm of rain per year. Mawsynram is high in the Khasi Hills of India and is directly in the path of the hot humid air that sweeps in from the Bay of Bengal. Most of Mawsynram’s rain falls during its monsoon season, which lasts from about April to October each year.
Guinness also states that Mount Waialeale has the most rainy days in Hawaii, with up to 350 rainy days per year.
Argyll in Scotland – the UK’s wettest region – receives 2,274.9mm of rain. But Met Office hill stations have recorded much higher numbers. The UK rain gauge with the highest average annual rainfall total is Crib Goch (Gwynedd) with 4,635 mm of rain followed by Styhead (Cumbria) at 4,562 mm.
Is April really the wettest month?
December is the wettest month of the year with a 1991-2020 average of 127.19mm. April averages 71.73mm for the same period.
The saying “March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers” dates back to 1886, although the idea that April is rainy goes back hundreds of years.
The jet stream – which is sent in showers – is extremely vague. Sometimes it gets deposited in the north and we have a dry April.
Is Manchester really the wettest city in Britain?
South Glamorgan (Cardiff) has slightly higher annual rainfall accumulations. For 1991-2020, the former had an annual average of 1,177.81mm of rainfall. Manchester had 1,087.14mm.
However, note that in relation to the number of rainy days, the Cardiff region had 201.93 and Manchester 214.18. The former has a higher number of days and accumulates more rain.
Is the West really wetter than the East?
Yes.
The Pennines of Northern England, the mountains of Wales, the Lake District and the Highlands of Scotland form a rain shadow that covers most of the eastern part of the United Kingdom, due to the usual south-westerly winds.
We have Atlantic rainforests to prove it. In this respect, Dartmoor, west Wales and Wigan are similar to southern Chile and British Columbia.
Does the sun ever shine on Northern Ireland?
From time to time, but the country sits in the central track of low pressure systems and therefore has the base of high winds and oceanic weather. In the north and on the east coast, especially, heavy westerly winds are common. Above the 800-foot (245-meter) level, twisted trees and wind breaks show how bad the weather is.
Are British summers really dry and sunny?
Yes-ish. In general, areas in the east and south of the UK tend to be drier, warmer, sunnier and less windy than areas further west and north. These favorable weather conditions occur more often in spring and summer than in autumn and winter.
Oliver Claydon of the Met Office says: “One study that may be of interest is that May is statistically drier than the summer months for the UK.”
The relevant stats are: May – 70.98mm, June – 77.2mm, July – 82.48mm and August – 93.73mm.
“One thing to be aware of here, however, is that in the summer months you can get a large total amount of rain per month except for heavy downpours or thunder, and in May the t -monthly total to be spread out more.”
