It is, I suppose, information that falls within the category of the blindingly obvious.

But even so, I’ve found myself brooding unnaturally on the news that it has been the dullest August since records began.

It’s almost as if I expect the longer I gaze at weather forecasts and examine the progress of warm fronts – or lack of progress – the more chance there will be of a sunnier spell.

It is, I admit rather perverse, not to say selfish, to bemoan the lack of sunshine when tens of thousands of people fled their homes in New Orleans in the face of another hurricane.

But even so, I do feel that somehow we’ve been cheated out of summer – as if the seasons have played a little joke on us by deciding to go from spring to autumn just for the sake of it and to see what kind of reaction there might be.

The brief euphoria provided by the Olympics was a welcome distraction, but now its over we’re back to that conundrum of where on earth all this cloud has come from.

I confess that my simmering resentment at nature’s fickle ways began quite early when I had a short break in Spain in May, which just happened to coincide with four days of incessant rain on the Continent while the UK was basking in an all-too-rare spell of glorious sunshine.

The villa we were staying in had a glorious view of a stunning mountain backdrop which we only realised was there on our last morning as the clouds finally lifted and we were packing our bags in the hire car to return to the UK.

When we visited bars – rather a lot of them – people would shrug their shoulders and tell us it was never normally like this.

Of course, we might get an Indian summer. But what good is that when we’re all back at work, children are at school, there is dew on the grass, the shops are full of winter clothes and Halloween is but a few weeks away?

Hollowing out pumpkins on a balmy summer-like evening just doesn’t make any kind of sense. A bit like our weather.