Paper Monitor: The sun ain't gonna shine
"June just rains and never stops. Thirty days and spoils the crops."
So sang Flanders and Swann half a century ago. Today's papers have much the same message.
"Britain should brace itself for a washout decade" - The Mirror
"Overcast with chance of showers... for TEN sodden years" - The Sun
"Decade of wet summers on the horizon" - The Daily Telegraph
It follows a Met Office conference which concludes that we're in the middle of a bad spell. It's all because of the jet stream, which is apparently not behaving itself. It may be caused by climate change. On the other hand, it may not. And it may not end for another 10 years. But on the other hand, it might do. Best take a brolly, anyway.
That's pretty much the (lack of) conclusion which the papers - and for that matter, the meteorologists - have arrived at.
The Sun continues: "It means we will all have to get used to sights like... the Hay Festival being turned into a mud bath." Paper Monitor sympathises - it knows how much Sun readers treasure their yearly trip to hear debates by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins and Margaret Attwood.
The question remains, however - why is it that "bad weather ahead" stories always seem to land on the days when the weather is actually quite pleasant (and vice versa)? The Daily Express, never knowingly under-served in the weather department, has the headline "Britain gets steamy on hottest day of year", while the rest of the press is filled with pictures of women in hats at Royal Ascot. Not a raincoat in sight there either.
So what have we got to look forward to? We don't know. Back to Flanders and Swann:
"In July the sun is hot. Is it shining? No, it's not."