FEARS that summer could be a grim repeat of last year's wet, windy and cold affair may yet prove to be premature. For the Echo has a cunning plan.
If everyone collectively breathes in deeply and then, all together, exhales in a northerly direction, there is just a chance that we might be able to Save Our Summer.
Such a "People's Puff" could be enough to tilt the weather off its present course in time to save our summer and barbecues.
You see the chilly winds, the pouring rain – even hail – the single digit temperatures and the lack of warming sunshine, are all down to the jet stream. Apparently invented last year to explain the washout summer, the invisible, all-powerful band of fast-moving air sweeping the sky high above us is, according to the experts, what decides the weather.
If the jet is to the north of us, it guides that changeable weather to the north to give us more settled conditions – which is what we expect in the summer.
If it's streaming over us or just to the south, we tend to get a lot of wet and windy weather – which is what we expect through winter, what we got last summer – and what we have today. But have no fear, we have two weeks to save the summer which doesn't officially start until June 1. The jet stream can and does move around quite a bit and can change its track in just a few days.
So previous results are no indicator of future performance, in fact the white-coated experts with their massive computer up the road at the Met Office find it a huge challenge to predict the exact track of the jet stream more than five or six days ahead, so there's still a great deal to play for in the outlook for our summer.
Then again it may not be the jet stream that decides our weather, but the Arctic ice loss. So, if everyone could collectively open their fridge doors and point them in a northerly direction...