Tourism faces a shower of spanners not quite out of the blue

THE problem about the weather changing before the bank holiday even arrived is having nowhere to vent our resentment over sunshine deprivation.

We're cheap drunks when it comes to sunshine. A few days with enough warmth to justify a visit to the beach and we fill up with optimism. If those few days happen in springtime, so much boundless unjustified optimism runs into us, we end up standing in the overflow. Against all the evidence provided by memory we even develop a conviction that this year we'll actually have a summer.

Imagine that. A summer as sweet and golden as the balmy versions experienced before the First World War. A summer filled with children doing real childlike things like building sandcastles, as opposed to being glued to a Playstation. A summer allowing parents to be experts again, gently showing toddlers that trying to dig a hole in dry sand is not as productive as going down nearer the sea to the hard, slightly damp stuff and that taking home a bucket full of pinkeens is not good for those miniature fish taken from rock pools, because they would miss their mammy.