“Our years are turned upside down; our summers are no summers; our harvests are no harvests!”
John King, an Elizabethan preacher, 1595
“It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all but the ways are dusty and the flyes fly up and down and the rose bushes are full of leaves; such a time of the year as never was known in this world before.”
Samuel Pepys‘ Diary, 21st January 1661
“Ordered by Parliament to pray for more seasonable weather; that it is, both as to warmth and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June, which doth threaten a plague to follow.”
Samuel Pepys‘ Diary, 15th January 1662
“Wind the last night (such as hath not been in memory before, unless at the death of the late protector) [Oliver Cromwell], that it was dangerous to go out of doors; and hearing how several persons have been killed today by the fall of things in the street and that the pageant in Fleet street is most of it blown down and hath broke down part of several houses.”
Samuel Pepys‘ Diary, 18th February 1662
“Is it not strange weather? Winter absorbed the Spring, and now Autumn is come before we have had summer: But let not our kindness for each other imitate the inconsistency of the seasons.”
Dr Samuel Johnson, 11th September 1784
British Gazette comment: Unseasonal weather has occurred throughout the ages. Of course, idiots like Ed Miliband will wonder how on earth our forebears suffered such before the advent of the “Chelsea tractor” [Mrs. Miliband’s Range Rover]