This column comes to you from Manchester, the English city whose propensity for cold drizzle has long been part of folklore (with reason, in my experience). Travelling up from the south on Friday, I did not even bother to bring a sweater, never mind an umbrella. There is a change in the weather, and it is psychological as well as meteorological.

The weather has always gone weird now and again, wherever we are. In every place, extremes turn into conversational touchstones that last as long as living memory. The British have the winter of 1963, the summer of 1976 and the storm of 1987; Chicago had the killer heatwave of 1995; the French shudder thinking about the heat of 2003.