Wet Wet Wet

The Met Office's 'barbecue summer' is turning out as predicted with sensational accuracy here. But at least it's not 1956. That was a miserable sodden summer and no mistake, one of its grisly highlights being a wave of storms on 30 July which dumped a full 9 inches of rain on Nairn (almost an anagram) in 48 hours. It was London's wettest July since records began (back in the 17th century), and on this day of it a 12-year-old boy who was being treated in St Thomas's Hospital was brought out by staff onto the riverside by Waterloo bridge, where he watched the river hurrying past, red with mud and swollen almost to flooding point with rain. Eleven years later, that memory inspired the opening of a song - Waterloo Sunset. For yes it was Ray Davies (and the story may or may not be true; it's in his autobiography.)