And their comments and quips have been preserved for posterity.

My personal favourite comes from Benjamin Franklin - he who invented the lightning conductor. He once said:

"Whilst some people are weatherwise, most are otherwise".

He may have said that more than 100 years ago but it holds true today. Franklin was an American scientist but our own L.F. Richardson penned this little ditty:

Big whirls have little whirls what feed on their velocity, little whirls have smaller whirls, and so on to viscosity.

William Shakespeare found the weather elements to be a source of inspiration, as in this extract from King Lear

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes,spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!"

That great American writer Mark Twain penned many weather witticisms

"A great, great deal has been said, about the weather, but very little has ever been done."

And…

"Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death!"

A contemporary of Twain was Jerome K. Jerome who said:

"The weather is like the government, always in the wrong."

But as the American humorist Kin Hubbard once said:

"Don’t knock the weather, nine out of ten people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while."

And I have to agree with John Ruskin that our weather is something to celebrate, not complain about:

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."