Today we’re going to talk about British weather and show you some footage of beautiful days here in southern England. We met and spent a lot of time in Syracuse, NY so that’s typically our reference point. Syracuse is a city in New York state, and New York state is large enough that you can almost fit all of the U.K. inside of it. Syracuse is in a region of New York called central New York and the weather there is very snowy and cloudy. It’s the second-most cloudy city in all of the U.S., and the snowiest city in the U.S. It gets over 100 inches of snowfall a year!

When we moved to England a lot of people said we were going to hate British weather. But in fact, we love it! For comparison’s sake, out of 365 days there are 260 days with either snow or rain in Syracuse. Whereas in souther England the average is 130 days of rain or snow. So there is significantly less rain and snow here. In Syracuse those 260 days might be a combination of snow and rain, here it’s mostly rain which makes for a very green and lush landscape. More importantly than these factual comparisons, let’s talk about how weather is a central topic in British conversation!

I think people here like to complain about the weather just because they like to complain. But also British people love to stay on safe, non-controversial topics of conversation. The safest topic that everyone engages in is talking about the weather. It’s the first thing you talk about, if not the only thing. We just had a general election and on election day no one at work even mentioned that it was voting day. Lillian had a concert that evening right across from a polling place and even then they didn’t mention it! In America we would be like “Yeah! It’s the day to vote! Go vote!” “Have you voted?” Politics is not polite so you just don’t talk about it at all, even if it is Election Day!

So given all the the pleasant weather, especially in the summertime, we thought we’d show you some of the things we get up to in this nice weather. We live really close to the water so we can walk five minutes and we’re at the beach.