I have a small, tattered clipping from an English newspaper that I sometimes pull out for purposes of amusement. It’s a weather forecast from a provincial paper called the Western Daily Press, and it says, in total, “Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.”

There you have in a single pithy sentence the English weather captured to perfection: dry but rainy, and with some warm/cool spells. The Western Daily Press could run that forecast every day—for all I know, it may—and scarcely ever be wrong.

To a foreigner the most striking thing about the English weather is that there isn’t very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability, and danger—tornadoes, monsoons, hurricanes, raging blizzards, run-for-cover hailstorms—are almost totally unknown in the British Isles.

Such weather as they do get is generally mild, damp, and dreary. One of the more durable of meteorological myths is that England receives a lot of rain. In fact it has a lower annual rainfall in total than Florida. It’s just that in Florida it rains in torrents from time to time. In England, it seldom really rains, but it drizzles more or less perpetually. Indeed, there are really only two weather conditions in the country: drizzle and about to drizzle.

Considering that England lies as far north as southern Alaska, the climate is remarkably mild. The reason for this, of course, is the steady, ameliorating winds of the Gulf Stream, or North Atlantic Drift to get technical about it, which not only keep England more or less permanently moist, but also make its climate one of the most stable in the world. A person waking from a coma and looking out the window would be hard-pressed to tell you what time of year it was. Real extremes of temperature are practically unknown. On only three occasions has the temperature touched 100 degrees in the sun. Never in recorded history has it been 100 degrees in the shade.

As a result, it takes a particularly attentive observer to note the change of seasons. Summer and winter are often practically interchangeable. It is not unknown for a midsummer’s day to be cooler than Christmas. Even in a good year, the English summer is an elusive and fleeting thing. King Charles II was scarcely exaggerating when he called it “three fine days followed by a thunderstorm.” Nor was Lord Byron when he said, “It comes between the end of July and the start of August.”

Despite the grim predictability of their weather, the English are obsessed with matters climatic. Two hundred years ago Samuel Johnson said, “When two Englishmen meet their first talk is of the weather,” and things have not changed a fraction since. It is a source of unceasing amazement to me that the English never, but never, tire of discussing the weather, nor fail to affect surprise at its awfulness.

“Shocking day,” one will observe to another, shaking his head astutely, as if he has never known it to be so bad. “Absolutely dreadful,” comes the hearty assent. How long, one might ask, does it take to realize that there is a certain meteorological pattern at work here, that the surprise would be if the weather wasn’t awful?