The irony is that this extraordinary year of sport and patriotic celebration is actually being enhanced by the recent weather.

Visitors and viewers from both Northern and Southern hemispheres can now see just how bravely we British battle – on a daily basis – our meteorological malaise.

And this, more than any other factor, will surely impress upon the world just why we British are rightly famed for our stiff upper lips, our unerring good humour, and our taste for warm beers.

I, however, disagree. A sentiment brought home to me last Thursday when, stopping at a newsagent to buy my winning Euro Lottery ticket, I realised that each and every customer was irritable.

The milk they had bought was off, the paperboy hadn’t delivered and the top-shelf range of glossy mags was simply too high to reach.

They were, as a mob, resentful, grumpy, impatient and sullen. Consequently, each transaction took ages, as each of them muddled their way through various beefs and complaints. Until finally the man in front of me did something extraordinary – he smiled.

“We Brits we can’t take the sun,” he explained, as if by way of apology to the increasingly defensive cashier. And he was right.

Last Thursday was hot, damn hot, and you would have thought this alone would have got us dusting off our Jubilee bunting and jiving in the street to Martha and the Vandellas.

Because weather-wise, let’s face it, the past six months have been about as cheery as an Emmerdale episode.

Surely the fact we could strip, sweat and perform public order offences without so much as a cagoule was reason enough to celebrate.

But no. Like a switch being thrown in Frankenstein’s hill-top refuge, all the sun did was saute our tempers and ignite our blind rage.

True, there were a few of us who knelt humbly before the altar of the one-day tan, but for the vast majority it seemed like excuse enough to give vent to all the injustice in the world (or at least its inability to match its weather to our moods).

I love Britain. I love Oxford. But I tell you I would trade places with anyone who already had a US Green Card, just to enjoy the warm light of a Californian evening, because the sun is the ultimate game-changer.

As a restaurant manager once told me in Cyprus: “Here, if our wife gets fresh with the milkman and our boss fires us, we simply go lay on a beach and, as Julie Andrews sung, we suddenly don’t feel so bad. But in Britain you miss your bus to work and it feels like the Day of Judgment...”

For me, the sun has always made everything right. It won’t stop the wife doing a runner or your boss’s dandruff alighting on you, but will mean the misery feels less final.

So for that alone, next time the weather breaks, can’t we just all make an effort to celebrate this fact?

After all, it doesn’t seem to have done the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese et al any harm.