I don’t want to be one of *those* Brits. Those Brits who complain about the weather all the time (it’s either too cold, too hot, too dry or too wet for those people). But I have to get it off my chest, guys. I just have to. I’m going to explode all over my office chair if I don’t.

This summer sucks balls.

There, I said it. This. Summer. Sucks. Balls.

It blows. It stinks. It can, quite frankly, fuck right off.

Spring wasn’t ideal either. I mean, March was nice. Then April was cold and pretty rainy. May was slightly warmer and very rainy. But June has been warm and super-duper rainy. Following this pattern, July is going to be confusingly hot and constantly pissing down. By August it’ll just be raining hot water every day.

I know spring and early summer in the Balkan Mountains is unpredictable. It is every year. June is always a stormy month. But the storms (usually) arrive late afternoon, giving us – and the garden – almost a full day of warm sunshine before the rain sets in. Which is actually ideal weather for a gardener. This year, however, we’re lucky if we get a dry spell of three or four hours in the morning. It’s a short window to get outdoor jobs done. (We’re in the midst of remodelling the summer kitchen and Rob has 10m³ of wood to chop.) Doing laundry has become a game of chicken with the weather.

And, look, it’s not all horrific. The first week of June was sunny and fairly dry. It was a gorgeous week and I revelled in it. But then the rain came back with a vengeance. Yesterday’s storm was so heavy the village road turned into a river. The gravel track next to our house was almost entirely washed away. Water ran down the inside of our walls. The greenhouse flooded. And a stream materialised through our veg garden. That’s new. Never had a stream in the garden before. Others in the region had it much worse than us. And I’m not unaware that complaining about the rain when people in Ukraine have had their entire homes and villages destroyed by flooding is, at best, self-indulgent. I don’t even have the words for that horror…

I just had to get it off my chest, that’s all. Sorry. I know the garden will recover. And July and August will bring more settled weather, as usual. It’ll all be fine. We’re lucky. Life is good. But my irrational brain can’t help but think the weather really has it in for me and my garden this year.

Plus, the exhaust fell off our (increasingly decrepit) car while I was in Sofia last Friday, and one of our cats died at the weekend. But that’s too sad to write about. So a rant about the weather is what you get instead.

Fellow Brits, feel free to join me in grumbling about the weather below. It is, after all, our national pastime. And everyone else, feel free to marvel at the British ability to talk for hours, days even, about weather to save ourselves from talking about – whisper it like the dirty words they are – *our feelings*.

Meanwhile, please enjoy some whimsical pictures of the flower garden, taken before yesterday’s storm flattened everything. Click to view as a slideshow, if that’s your bag.