WELL here we go yet again. We’re at that point in the summer when the days are getting just a little shorter and the rain is becoming a little more frequent.

June and July saw the country enjoy weeks of glorious sunshine and heat, so naturally the first time it rains it’s treated like the end of the world but also the best thing since sliced bread.

We British are a curious race, constantly disappointed or fed up with the weather. When it was hot, it was too hot. Although in fairness, by the time I’d seen the first pasty skinny youths strolling around the city with their shirts off and hands down their tracksuit bottoms, I’d had enough of the sunshine as well.

So of course, we become eager for rain. “It’ll be good for the garden”, “I like it warm, but this is just silly”, all that stuff. Funny how quickly we forget – in a couple of months there’ll be a lot of people talking about how we don’t get proper summers any more. We could have five years of scorching sunshine, but within 20 minutes of the first downpour, 99 per cent of the population would be banging on about how the weather’s always miserable in the UK and they’d give anything for a break in the sun.

In a way, there’s a delightful predictability to the nature of our country. We buy the cheapest possible ready meals, and when the beef turns out to be anything but, there’s national outcry – we can’t believe the mince in that £1 frozen lasagne wasn’t ground-up sirloin, what an absolute outrage.

We vote in our millions through some premium-rate phone line to help some shiny-faced teenager with a sob story win a record deal, but thousands fewer each year can be bothered to read a leaflet and make an informed decision about who we want to run our local authorities or our country.

The numbers might not add up, but we complain as much about one as we do the other.

Sometimes it’s just easier that way. We, as a nation, love having something to complain about. I’d be curious to know how far back that goes – whether the Romans, Celts and Vikings were as pessimistic as we were – or whether it’s something that developed in the last couple of hundred years.

While I agree with the old cliché that a pessimist is never disappointed – and I say that as someone who is as pessimistic as the next man – it’s also nice to have a little faith and optimism in life.

Admittedly, it’s difficult. When there’s so much negativity bombarding us on a minute-by-minute basis, on television, radio, on and social media, it becomes almost impossible to filter it out.

How do we know the Fairtrade coffee we buy is actually benefiting impoverished Columbian farmers and not just making a few extra quid for the multinational supermarket or coffee shop we’ve bought it from?

Can we be sure the bucket-waving charity collectors in the street are giving everything they make to whichever good cause has its logo on the tin?

Can we ever really know whether the politicians for whom we vote for are genuinely trying to do their best for the people who vote for them, and not just make money for their friends or a name for themselves?

Obviously, I don’t have the answers. I don’t think there are any. Blind faith gets the world into a lot more trouble than caution, and it’s not really necessary for the little things you can make an informed decision about.

But one thing we can believe in is that it’s going to rain until it’s sunny again, and we’re going to complain about all of it.