Swithun

Well, we got through St Swithun's Day, yesterday, without any rain.  Today, however, it's been coming down like stair rods (as, for some reason, they say) - but we can't lay the blame on the saint.  Swithun - who had been a holy and generous Bishop of Winchester - famously did not want his tomb to be moved inside the cathedral;  he wished to lie where the rain could fall on his grave. When, some few years after his death, the saint's remains were moved to a new site inside the church, a heavy shower of rain marked the saint's displeasure.

In fact that story seems to date from long after the event, and there are no contemporary records (the grave was moved in the tenth century) to show that there was such a shower.  Nonetheless, the tradition that if it rains on St Swithun's Day it will rain for the next forty is long-founded.  And it is on the whole not without credibility, I think - not in terms of the miraculous intervention of a Saxon saint, but of the established patterns of British weather.

If a spell of unsettled weather has established itself to the extent that there is rain around the middle of July, it is, sadly, more than likely that similar conditions will persist through much of the rest of the summer.  And since it rained on Saturday and today, the fact that we had a miraculously dry day on which to celebrate St Swithun won't make much difference to the likely weather patterns on from this point.  (Anyway, it's a Leap Year this year - maybe the saint is a day out in his reckoning!) Where the weather is concerned, we get what we get, and just have to put up with it.

Having said that, there are signs that the jet stream (more to blame than any saint for our cool and rainy summer) might be moving to a more northerly latitude, and the weatherman I watched last night was prepared to hint that things could settle down and warm up later in the week.  Frankly, I'm not optimistic, and he certainly wasn't making any promises, but it would be nice for me, and the devotees of St Swithun, to be proved wrong.