Conversations about the weather are rarely actually about the weather. As the social anthropologist Kate Fox writes in her brilliant and often snort-inducing book, Watching the English, weather chat is in fact “a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our natural reserve and actually talk to each other.” In other words, while some primates groom each other’s fur, we muse about scattered showers.
And we can attribute one more quality to the weather – the cause of our economic feebleness. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 0.1 per cent GDP growth in the first quarter of the year can, in part, be blamed on an exceptionally wet March (the sixth wettest since 1836), reducing output and leading to a decline in retail sales.
