IF ONLY all aspects of life were as reliable as the unreliability of the British weather. Though it won’t be much consolation, those affected by Wednesday’s storm should know that it was caused by an encounter between our own northern cold air and a more civilised, southern, breed of air, warmer and more Mediterranean in style.

Apparently when the two meet they make a 60mph (100km/h) storm with little regard for the consequences. One hundred thousand homes went dark, 25ft waves crashed down in the English Channel, and the ENO had to cancel its open-air production of Puccini’s La Bohème in Trafalgar Square. Thousands of years of experience on these islands are not, it seems, enough to inure us against surprise when it comes to the wind and rain.

The climate of the British Isles is a problem second only, surely, to the most arcane parts of cosmology in terms of complexity. Time of year, number of important tennis matches being played, likelihood of planning a picnic — all have a role in determining the chance of rain. Go to FitzRoy (Headline), by John and Mary Gribbin, to learn about the man who did most to turn our national obsession into a science. Admiral Fitzroy is most famous as Darwin’s captain on HMS Beagle, but his career didn’t end there: he set up the Meteorological Office in 1854 to provide information to fellow mariners. Today at the Met more than 1,000 people and two Cray supercomputers combine efforts in a constant attempt to determine when the sun will have his hat on. Try Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future (Routledge), edited by Mike Hulme et al, if you want to understand how they do it.

For most of us, though, our concern with the weather is practical, not scientific. Outdoor events are planned “weather permitting”, but a certain grim determination dictates that they carry on unless there is a chance of severe injury or death. In The Worst Journey in the Midlands: One Man, A Boat, and the British Weather (Summersdale Publishers), Sam Llewellyn recalls rowing through the Midlands to London; his dealings with gale-force winds will sound familiar to anyone in the South of England who went outside on Wednesday. That will seem tame, however, compared with the weather, rendered in beautifully descriptive prose, faced by Redmond O’Hanlon in Trawler (Penguin). O’Hanlon joins Scottish fishermen as they venture into the North Atlantic and endure a Category One Force 12 hurricane to secure their catch.

But the British weather is not all gloom. Go to Ian McEwan’s Atonement (Vintage) to read one of our best writers on the unique event that is a British hot spell: “I love England in a heatwave,” says the protagonist, “it’s a different country.”