If you don’t want to hear the bad news, turn away now. A proper summer is not in sight for the foreseeable future. Not only did it pour down yesterday but it rained on St Swithin’s day last Sunday and, by tradition, that means 40 days of rain. The tradition could be proved right.

There is a hint of a sunny spell at the beginning of August, but this is clutching at straws – it is still a long way off for forecasting with confidence and even if a decent spell of high pressure comes our way the chances are it will be barged off by another assault of wet Atlantic depressions. With double the average rainfall for June and this month so far, we could be heading for the wettest summer on record.

To add to the frustration, we are tantalisingly close to some blistering heat. Much of central and southeastern Europe is roasting in obscene heat-waves – caused by Saharan air that has drifted up from North Africa – that have killed dozens of people.

The trouble is that Europe is split in two by the jet stream, a fast river of wind that snakes around the world a few miles high. It marks the boundary between cold and warm air masses, and this summer we are on the cool side, with little chance for our usual Azores high pressure system to deliver warm, sunny weather.

Worse still, the jet stream is buckling because it is so sluggish at present, which means that the weather has got stuck in a rut: the huge downpours of yesterday were delivered by very slow-moving bands of rain with little to blow them away.

Perhaps the problem is that we’ve forgotten how bad summer can be in this country. More than 30 years ago, and especially in the 1950s, it was nothing unusual to get summer blighted by rain and cold (see table below).

The summer of 1956 was abysmal: rain, hail, lightning, floods, gales and miserable cold. It was the wettest July in London since records began, and August was one of the coldest and wettest on record across Britain, as barrages of depressions swept the country. But there was a silver lining to this cloud – September was such an improvement it was warmer than August, a very rare occurrence, and the rest of autumn turned into a glorious Indian summer. Could the same happen again this year?

It is dangerous looking for patterns in summer weather because our climate has changed so much over 50 years. In contrast with 1956, this summer’s temperatures have held up surprisingly well: above average last month and a touch down this month, which probably shows how much global warming underpins our climate.

But look on the bright side. There are no hosepipe bans and the underground water reserves are full after years of drought.

One last thing: the first half of this year has been the second hottest on record across the globe – global warming is carrying on relentlessly, whatever happens in Britain.

Soaking summers

1816 Frost, hail, gales, rain, the coldest summer after the eruption of Tambora in what is now Indonesia

1845 Incredible rain and humidity set off potato blight and the Irish Potato Famine

July 9, 1840 Two inches of snow in Ellingham, Nothumberland

June, 1860 Wettest on record

July 7 and 11, 1888 Snowfalls above 1,500ft with depths reaching 5cm across the Antrim hills in Northern Ireland

1903 Wettest summer on record, a record year for mud, fields turned to swamps and a desperate harvest. The longest continuous rains – for over 58 hours in mid-June. Snow in Newmarket and Cambridgeshire in June

August 1912 Wettest August of century, severe floods in East Anglia.

August 1917 Rain turned Passchendaele (3rd battle of Ypres) into a quagmire

July 1922 Coldest of the century and wet

July 1936 Cold and wet

1954 Wet and cold summer

July 1956 Cold wet and dull

August Bank Holiday 1986 Worst bank holiday in living memory, with wind, rains and floods

1997 Wettest June of the century – an average of 133.7mm of rain