I picked up a little gem of a book by Richard Mabey entitled 'Turned Out Nice Again: Living with the Weather'. Brits are pre-occupied by the weather and it is normally the first or second topic to come up in a conversation.
This passage from the book sums up British weather pretty well;
We don't have to live with active volcanoes or sudden tsunamis. The temperature has only exceeded 100 degrees three times in the last hundred years. The heaviest rainfall in a single day was eleven inches in Martinstown Dorset on 18 July, 1955. When you compare that with the several feet that can fall in a couple of hours in a tropical monsoon you can get our weather in some sort of perspective. What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you're going to be under three feet of snow every December.
Whimsical is a good term for it, but it's hard to feel very whimsical about the weather when you wake up for church on Palm Sunday and have to scrape your windshield and expect similar for the rest of Holy Week.
