Paper Monitor
12:33 UK time, Thursday, 30 July 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
People of Britain, our time is so now.
One of the defining characteristics of the great British populace is the enthusiasm we reserve for talking about the weather.
And so the excitement has been palpable ever since the Met Office first promised a "barbecue summer" a few months back - not only are there barbecues to look forward to, think of the conversational gambits this concept opens up!
Especially now the Met Office has revised this forecast to, er, "summer is cancelled".
And the papers are all over it, from the Daily Express - it's always fond of a weather story - to the Sun (in short supplies these days... geddit?).
"Lady and the damp" is the front page headline of the Times, with a photo of a thoroughly disenchanted elderly woman in a plastic bonnet glaring at the raindrops.
(Incidentally, the one defence the Met Office has NOT yet used is that this is a barbecue summer. A British barbecue, where the outdoor cooking is traditionally conducted under a marquee, raindrops bouncing off the hot coals, as guests sip increasingly diluted beers before giving up and eating their charred sausages indoors.)
And finally, no doubt it has been noted before, and will be mentioned again. Quoted in many of the papers today is one Lord Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association (see the and the ). A hereditary peer, one can only assume that he has long been familiar with the nickname "Melchy".
The 
