The rainy city?

Ah, baby, it’s raining. Again. Every year we’re told it’s the wettest, hottest, coldest, windiest, sunniest since records began (usually in the same month) and every year we roll our eyes and privately think, ‘well, it’s just English weather, what do they expect?’ But this year it really is the wettest summer England has ever known, and we’ve got raging flood waters to prove it.

First Hull and Sheffield found themselves under water, and then a few weeks later Tewkesbury, Gloucester, Bath, Worcester, Abingdon and Reading found themselves (literally) in the same boat. Though the media like to crank up the hysteria, there was no denying the catastrophic effects: all those families, both north and south, having to watch their lives float away on the fetid brown waters.

So this is your first lesson in climate change (although some – including George Bush, a war-loving US president you’ll one day read about in your history books – still swear blind that climate change is a figment of the scientific community’s collective imagination). The irony of it is that by the time you’re old enough to register the waxing and waning of the seasons, damp, dank summers like these will be long past.

What summer will mean to you will be hosepipe bans, sweat collecting in the small of your back, front pages that scream of water shortages and sucked-dry reservoirs. You’ll moan at me to buy you ice cream and a paddling pool, and when I say no you’ll try your luck with your dad. You won’t see Glastonbury-goers sliding down muddy hills and struggling with tents in the rain, and I won’t buy you welly boots to take to your first ever festival ‘just in case’ your trainers get sucked deep down into a puddle of mud.

And the strangest thing about this long, wet summer is that, up here in the rainy city (Manchester), we’ve so far got off lightly. No floods, no gardens washed away, no rivers bursting their banks. Just sodden, squelching grass underfoot when your dad walks the dog and your mum shaking her fist at the slugs, who take advantage of all this water to rampage about, eating her flowers and leaving gleeful slime trails in their wake.