If this week’s downpours felt like a monsoon, you would be right. This is exactly when Europe’s own monsoon drops torrents of rain in two main bursts, in early and mid-June. This year’s monsoon has arrived late, but seems to be making up for lost time.

This is nothing like the famed Indian monsoon, though, with months of torrential rains driven by intense heatwaves. Ours is a much more sedate affair and is known as the return of the westerlies — after an absence during the spring, westerly winds loaded with moisture sweep off the Atlantic and drop their cargo of rains in heavy, thundery downpours for at least a week or so.

In fact, our monsoon is so predictable that records over a 30-year period show the phenomenon very clearly. But what drives it and its punctual behaviour is not clear at all.

The downpours and floods were largely down to a sluggish depression that draped its long weather fronts over the UK, and because it meandered fairly aimlessly it had plenty of time to drop sensational rainfalls. Unfortunately the outlook remains unsettled into next week, at least.

We have suffered June’s outrageous rains before. It is no coincidence that the Glastonbury Festival often turns into a glorious mudbath and Wimbledon gets washed out. Most notorious of all, the June monsoons were the storms that battered the Channel in June 1944 and almost wrecked the D-Day landings in Normandy. How this month earned its title of “flaming June” is a mystery.