'Tis Still The Summer Of Our Discontent

As a perfect follow on from yesterday’s blog, in today’s news there is a story highlighting the rapidly declining quality of this summer’s weather.

Organisers of the popular one-day Brecon County Show in mid-Wales have been forced to cancel it for the first time in 254 years because of the weather.

This agricultural show which has an attendance of 10,000 people each year, was due to be staged on Saturday.

The committee held a crisis meeting yesterday after hearing the weather forecast, and unfortunately, after so much rain and with the promise of more to come, including on show day itself, they had no alternative but to cancel the show.

The show society's secretary, Barbara Green said it would lose up to £30,000.

"The marquees are all up, we've taken over 1,000 entries for livestock, dogs, sheep… everything was in place and ready to go," she said.

"We are very, very disappointed and it was a very hard decision to make as we have been planning it for the last year or so. But everyone's been very understanding and we aim to be back next year."

"This is the first time in the show's 254 year history that it's been cancelled because of the weather," Ms Green added. "It was called off once before in 2001 because of the foot-and-mouth disease restrictions. But the show went ahead fine the following year so we hope that will be the case this time."

Do you believe me now? The weather IS going mad!

Consider, this agricultural show has been going since 1755, held in one of the wettest parts of the UK, it has jogged along quite nicely, thank you, in those heady pre-global warming days. Then all of a sudden, Kaboom! This field is waterlogged on the first Saturday in August for the first time in over a quarter of a millennium.

This alleged global warming’s not going to be any good if it can’t even dry out a soggy field so that a few thousand folk can have a day out at a much anticipated show, is it?