People from other more tropical countries like to point out all the bad things about English weather, like the fact that it’s cold more than it’s hot, it rarely ever gets above room temperature outside, and that it rains almost every single day up north. Personally I think they are missing out. They are missing out on the drama of the great outdoors, something that Great Britain has in spades!

I recently took my Brazilian friend out to show him this drama first-hand. “Where we go?” he said.

I said, “The woods, you haven’t seen dramatic English weather until you’ve headed out in to the woods in gale force winds”. He didn’t know what a gale was and that was probably a good thing because he would never have agreed.

We stepped out of the car (him in his flip-flops, me in my walking boots). The wind was so strong it was snapping twigs off in the distance. You could hear them. In the wood Great British carnage was ensuing!

“Come on,” I told him, “let’s get in there before we miss the good stuff!” The good stuff, as anyone who has been in a wood during gale-force winds knows, is trees being uprooted and the like. Just what Paulo needed to see. Some real weather, the British way!

It was indeed a hellish ten minutes. First we had to take shelter behind a massive tree trunk as the wind grew to such extremes that it brought everything crashing down, then Paulo started to cry: he had lost a prized flip-flop and a small bottle of Brazilian organic moisturiser.

Once we were out of there Paulo did indeed know what dramatic weather was. He thanked me then, very suddenly, he stopped talking. For some reason he’s been very quiet ever since and he keeps saying he wished he’d never come to England–