And so it begins. As the number of weeks until the time when we decide to load up the car and head off to somewhere near the seaside for a camping holiday clicks into single figures, I begin to fret about the weather.

Not without due reason, obviously, this being the wettest June since the ice caps melted and tightly-packed isobars of low pressure stacking up over Britain like 747s in a landing pattern when the air traffic controller has gone for a wee.

Still, we tell ourselves. It can’t possibly last into July or August, can it? There can’t possibly be so much rain in the sky that it will bucket down between now and the end of the school holidays? Our logic becomes increasingly more fuzzy. We’re due a hot summer, we tell ourselves, as though the planet’s increasingly goosed climate operates on some kind of fair and proper turn-based system.

We’ll be off camping again, like we did last year. Camping in Britain, because all those nice celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Julie Walters and that lad off Harry Potter have been appearing on telly advertisements imploring us to holiday in Britain, because Britain’s ace.

The thing is, the kids don’t really care whether it’s sunny. They’ll go body-boarding in the rain, happily run around in a field in a force-nine gale. But I have been conditioned to believe that a summer holiday requires some kind of input from the flaming ball of gas 93 million miles away. I know, call me old fashioned if you will.

My wife will readily vouch for my insanely-optimistic weather-watching on holidays. I will emerge from a caravan, or hotel, or – as seems to be increasingly the case – a tent, and look up at the invariably overcast sky. My face will darken momentarily, then I will swing so far the other way as to be intensely annoying.

“The cloud looks thinner than it did half an hour ago,” I will say, screwing my face up, staring at the sky.

“It’s high cloud. The sun will burn it off by lunchtime,” I will sagely announce.

“There’s definitely a slightly brighter glow to that pale orb hiding behind the clouds,” I will opine, squinting unnecessarily at something about as bright as a cigarette in a stocking.

“Look! Look! There’s a patch of blue over there – there, about 50 miles south-west! The sun’s going to break through!” I will shriek, running around in circles, ripping off my clothes and slathering myself with Factor 30.

At which point I will realise that everyone else has just been trying to enjoy themselves anyway, without my tense weather reports. Perhaps it’s better to just accept the weather for what it is.

But if I find myself sheltering from an incessant downpour beneath the precarious canvas of the family tent this summer, and happen to catch sight of a newspaper photograph of Rupert Grint sunning himself in some far-flung tropical paradise, I will not be a happy camper.