The national press has been full of some good news about how this wonderful, dry summer has revealed the best showing of aerial photos of archaeology for years.
Pardon? The last time I looked out of the window there were big black clouds and it was on the verge of tipping it down.
It seems to have been like that since the first week of July – when, incidentally, I got back from a fortnight in Cornwall feeling very pleased with myself for getting it right again. It was hot and sunny for 13 of our 14 days by the sea.
Then, as usual, the school summer holidays were blighted by cool, damp weather. There's not been much playing out in the garden for our two kids.
Sometimes I wonder if the swing set, climbing frame and see-saw could go back on eBay, where I got them from.
Yet, we've had a few days away and have been lucky. Mid-week trips to the south-west and north-west came up trumps.
Somehow, it seems as though we haven't had a summer, except for the one way back in the springtime.
We were all getting into work after a bad night's sleep because it was so hot. I remember having windows open and the bed covers off.
Yet, according to the papers, the weather conditions since early summer have allowed experts to take aerial photos of dozens of so-called crop mark sites.
They reveal a Roman camp in Dorset, a fortress in North Yorkshire, more sites in the West Midlands, Cumbria, the Yorkshire Wolds and Vale of York. Sixty new sites, mainly prehistoric, were found in just one day over the East Riding.
I'm a big fan of archaeology – I've even got a qualification in it – so this is fantastic news for enthusiasts.
And even the Met Office agrees with me about the weather: "July saw more than twice the normal rainfall in a swathe from west Wales through north-west England, southern and eastern Scotland to Shetland.
"It was also wetter than normal across most of the rest of Scotland and Wales and in Northern Ireland."
So what's all this about a great summer?
Oh, hang on – there's a "but": "In sharp contrast," it says, "much of the Midlands, eastern and southern England were very dry, with less than half the normal amount of rain in counties from Cambridgeshire to Sussex. Overall, it was duller than average, especially in many western areas."
So, there we have it. It's not been a wet summer on the whole, even for August, apparently. Just dull. And, with more of the past being revealed than at any point since the great drought of 1976, that's hardly dull, is it?
Words by Patrick Astill, first published, and copyright Derby Telegraph
