Hey man, take a look out the window see what’s happenin’. Hey man, it’s rainin’ - Jimi Hendrix

I woke up on Monday morning and looked out of the window. The river was now in the meadow. A light precipitation, coda to the long night’s rain, wrapped the world in a shroud. I attempted to wade to my neighbours and failed. I went the long way round and found them bailing out. Why was it raining so much? Elementary, my dear reader. It was the first day of Wimbledon.

I arrived at Liverpool Street station and it had started to be a nice day. As the taxi reached the postal district of SW19, we began to enter the heart of darkness. This was Wimbledon, the Land of the Long Black Cloud. As I entered through Gate Five, the first fat drops were beginning to fall. By the time I was at my desk in the press room, the brollies were up and the rain was down.

I have measured out my life in rain delays. Times without number I have sat staring gloomily at the unrelenting downpour. “And I’m sorry to say that the news from the London Weather Centre is that there will be a further shah in about an ah.” And ah after ah would pass and shah after shah would fall (as shahs do). In my early days I would cheer myself up with pints of Guinness – on the whole a successful ploy until the rain stopped and 800 words of sober reflection were required.

No other gambit works. I’ve tried reading books and even writing them, both with indifferent success. A blast of fine music never truly calms the fretfulness brought on by the spectacle of one’s life vanishing down the plughole. Outside, people march the umbrella march, or moodily drink Pimm’s, a drink that simply doesn’t work under cloud cover. Sometimes they peer through the window at the press room and watch us journos bitching at each other and wondering whether to write a story about (a) the price of strawberries or (b) the feasibility of putting a roof over the Centre Court (can’t do that one any more, alas) or (c) the parlous state of British tennis (oh, that one’s safe for years to come).

Why did the English invent lawn tennis, a game for which lovely weather is a prerequisite? Why didn’t our ancestors create a great festival around badminton in the church hall? Why couldn’t Wimbledon be a large and beautiful indoor venue for the All England Ping Pong Championships?

But we didn’t stop with Wimbledon. The English also invented cricket. Reader, have you ever tried to play cricket in the rain? Some advice: don’t. It is the single most miserable and pointless thing a person can do. But it happens when a once-a-year fixture has been arranged and no one wants to give up. So you field with your jumper getting longer and longer and heavier and heavier, while the ball becomes unbowlable and, for that matter, invisible. It’s all perfectly ghastly until the pub opens at last and puts you out of your misery.

I have looked out at all the traditional Test-match grounds of the country, watching the rain fall or the light fail. Of course I have: such things are an irrefragable aspect of the English climate – and yet we are supposed to be surprised. As well as be surprised by the fact that the sun rises in the east.

English skies are traditionally as uncertain as a baby’s bottom, as Mr Dedalus remarked. So how do we deal with this? By having Royal Ascot. Admittedly you can gallop a horse in the rain, but it’s fun only if you happen to be the one on the horse. A festival of fancy dress and silly hats is destroyed when the rains fall. And yet we also have Henley Royal Regatta, and it is a fact of life that you can wear Charley’s Aunt costumes only when the sun shines.

It is a complete insanity: as if they decided to hold a skiing championship in Sydney in the summer, or maybe an outdoor badminton tournament in Chicago. Imagine inventing a sport and/or an occasion totally unsuited to the prevailing climate, and then making it the centre-point of the sporting and/or social year. That, it has to be admitted, is demented: and that is the English summer.

Why do we do it? The answer is simplicity itself: because it’s all so lovely when it works. Few things are as pleasant as a day’s cricket at Lord’s when the sun shines, especially when the Australians are coming second. You can argue that this doesn’t happen very often, but that’s the whole point.

Few things are as lovely as a day’s tennis at Wimbledon: the unfolding drama of the white-clad figures, the profound involvement of the spectators, the euphoria of a great match, the soft caress of a Pimm’s as the sun reluctantly cools and you can’t quite bear to leave. These things are so good that it’s worth putting up with the aching misery when it all goes wrong.

If you disagree, the evidence is against you: Wimbledon and cricket would have long ago gone extinct had people not been prepared to put up with the leaden days of misery in exchange for the occasional but unforgettable day of wonder.

That is the great English tradition. When great things come along, they must be revelled in. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, make hay while the sun shines, and he who kisses a joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise. It is the bedrock of the English temperament.

We make all the jokes about rain and affect an all-embracing pessimism, not to say cynicism: it’s going to rain tomorrow, you just see, all you have to do is organise a picnic/game of cricket/trip to Wimbledon and down comes the rain. Yet behind all this dutiful pessimism lurks a rebellious spark of hope, a thing that cannot wholly be extinguished.

Let’s go to Wimbledon. I know it’s all going to be ghastly – but what if it isn’t? What if the sun shone and the sport was hot and the Pimm’s cold and all the men were handsome and all the women beautiful and the day was all perfect? Never mind all those times when things went wrong; this time it may all go right.

There is an English history of defiance: defiance of invaders, of our own climate. We take on our own climate with a series of aggressive counter-attacks – Wimbledon, Lord’s, Henley, Ascot – and in the end, if only for a day, the climate has to submit and send us, however reluctantly, a day of pure gold.

The English summer season of sport represents the ultimate triumph of optimism. It reflects the essential English delight in seizing of the moment: the certainty that it’s worth any amount of misery to experience a single perfect day. We can put up with 364 atheistic days in a calendar year on account of the fact that there will be – must be – a single day in which God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.