I WONDER how many of your readers would agree with me that this country is getting steadily wetter and wilder, and has been doing so since at least the catastrophic summer of 2007.

Ever since, Britain has faced a seemingly constant barrage of flooding with cold, miserable summers, and abysmal winters.

One need only think of the winter weather which confronted us both ends of 2010, while about the current winter (now spring?) it would be kinder not to comment.

If this is ‘warming’, global or otherwise, it doesn’t feel like it.

Of course, I am aware there have been atrocious winters in the past but at least then, at other times, there were compensations.

Let’s take just the three most notorious winters of the post-1945 period. The winter of 1946-47 was followed (I understand) by a long, hot summer. The freezing winter of 1962-63 was preceded by some years by the summer of 1959, a scorcher, and 1978-79 (the ‘winter of discontent’) was preceded, again, not only by the long, hot summer of 1976, but also the altogether exceptional summers of 1975 and ’77.

If none of our current, nasty winters quite matches the three above, where have our summers gone?

In the most recent years can anyone recall a summer even to match 1975, let alone 1976?

Of course, we may get a scorcher this year – has anyone seen that pig in the sky?

NICHOLAS WILSON

Summerhill Road

Summertown