Drip, drip, dropped… has climate change killed off April showers?

The English obsession with meteorological small-talk – which surely extends to all inhabitants of the British isles – was, like so much else, neatly skewered by Dr Samuel Johnson: “It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.” Writing in a particularly wet June of 1758, Johnson attributed this to the unusual fickleness of the native climate.

Even so, over the centuries, certain British expectations about weather patterns have become received wisdom. One is that April is particularly showery. Pack your umbrella. Don’t even think about hosting an outdoor event unless you have heaters and one of those awnings that can be pulled swiftly over shivering partygoers at the first sign of a downpour.

From Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, celebrating April’s “shoures soote” (or “sweet showers”) to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the “cruellest month” starts “stirring dull roots with spring rain”, there is little doubt about it: April is sporadically, deliciously wet.

Except that this April wasn’t. Or at least, not in England. After a notably sodden January and February, the middle-spring month flaunted its blue skies. Between 1-17 April, south-east and central-southern England had recorded only 8.9mm of rain, just 17 per cent of the monthly average. In East Anglia, it was even drier, at 7 per cent. The exception was Scotland, which was wetter than normal. But for the English at least, April showers are steadily shrinking.

Last year saw the UK’s sunniest April since records began in 1910 – and it was followed by the hottest and driest summer on record for the UK, one which managed to nudge the famously scorching summer of 1976 out of the top five. Last summer there were hosepipe bans across England. Given the dry spring this year, they might well be in place again this summer.

When broader trends are taken into account, the shift is towards wetter winters and drier summers in the UK, largely as a result of man-made climate change. Spring has moved its opening date: according to an organisation called Nature’s Calendar, a citizen science project which collects data on seasonal signifiers, frogspawn, nesting blackbirds and flowering hazel all emerged this year at their earliest point this century.

With such rapid change comes the worry that what was once a complex, smoothly running eco-system will get knocked out of sync: that food sources such as caterpillars, for example, may peak before the nestlings that depend on them have hatched.

Such disturbing awareness, of intricate natural systems now being irreversibly damaged by forces beyond anyone’s individual control, rightly haunts the modern consciousness in a way alien to our ancestors. Yet they too were beset by their own, more visceral, terrors.

Alongside the perception of danger, human survival has always demanded the ability to hang on to optimism and relish beauty in the moment: the shadow of existential angst cannot hang over every sunny spring day, or branch of flowering hazel.

Still, now that April showers have been re-examined, so might the wise saws associated with May. I always thought that “N’er cast a clout till May is out” was a simple, stern warning that British weather is too unreliable to jettison warm clothes until June.

But others argue that “till May is out” in fact refers to the period when the hawthorn, or “may”, is flowering. In many areas, the plant is already in bloom: this year the annual British ceremony of “getting your legs and arms out”, rather like our spring, might happen sooner than expected.