And on the 9th August the temperature in Totterdown reached 36 degrees!

All-in-all, it was the best summer since 1995, and it would feature high in a list of top summers over the last 200 years.

The law of averages would suggest that the summer of 2004 will be at best rather indifferent.

The Met Office’s long-range, and still largely experimental, forecast is predicting fairly average conditions.

So should we give up all hopes of a fine summer for at least a few years?

We should first decide what constitutes ‘summer’. The Met Office simplifies statistical analysis by designating June, July and August as ‘summer’.

Purists and those with an astronomical bent would argue that summer does not start until three months after the spring equinox around the 21st March.

But for the sake of simplicity we will stick with the Met Office’s version.

Sunshine

Most of us measure the quality of a summer by the amount of sunshine we receive.

An average summer will yield about 570 hours of bright sunshine. Surprisingly perhaps, the sunniest summer was not 1976 but 1989 with 816 hours of sunshine

How many of us remember just how good 1996 was? There were 772 hours of bright sunshine back then, more than in the ‘Year of the Drought’, 1976 (759 hours).

If we continue to judge summers by the sunshine records then 1975 rates very highly (766 hours).

But there is then a long gap to 1959 (664 hours).

There were many fine summers during the 1950s but the war years were not as good as your parents or grandparents would have you believe.

Only the summer of 1940 could be classed as exceptional (731 hours). Perhaps the change to double summertime during the war years was a significant factor.

So which was the best summer? As we have already noted, 1989 was the sunniest year.

Heat

The warmest was 1995 with a mean temperature of 18.8 degrees Celsius. It was also the driest with an accumulated rainfall total of just 36 millimetres. (1976 clocked up 81 millimetres).

Overall though, there is a strong case for the summer of 2003 being the best of the lot.

Good summers do sometimes occur in pairs. 1975 and 1976 are the best examples.

So whilst it is important to bear in mind that good summers are fairly infrequent (about one in every eight) they can sometimes occur close together.

Let us just hope that is the case for 2004.