Heavy rain, driving wind, leaden skies – the golf at the Royal Birkdale Open Championship at Southport, Lancashire, is under way in true British summer weather. And how fitting that England’s Graeme Storm led the way at the start of play.

This foul weather is caused by a depression doing a slow pirouette from Scandinavia, skirting around Scotland before passing back up to southern Scandinavia. But as the low pressure departs our shores with its wind and rains, its place will be taken by the Azores High, the anticyclone that brings warm, sunny times. There are hopes that this high pressure will bring a decent spell of sun from Sunday onwards, and fight off depressions trying to barge in from the Atlantic.

But the Open Golf Championship has quite a track record for challenging conditions. In 2007 St Andrews sweltered in heat until the wind suddenly shifted and a haar rolled in, a thick coastal fog that sent temperatures plunging. In 2002 Muirfield, on the Firth of Forth on the East Coast of Scotland, was hit by a fierce storm with horizontal rain and totally defeated Tiger Woods in one of his worst days of golf. But in 1987 the Open at Muirfield produced a shocking spell of four days of unrelenting cold, wet and windy weather.