Hi Df! Lovely to hear from you personally. You should post more often.
Yes, Great Britain is very often a grey and rainy place from September to the end of March.
That's not to say it always rains and we do get many sunny days but cloud is always there somewhere.
Even in the summer the weather is always mixed. If you go to Southern Europe, you can pretty much count on sunny days and clear nights from April to October with little rain. In the UK and a lot of Northern Europe, rain is our constant companion even in high summer although any of our weather, happily, does not normally reach the extremes found in a lot of the USA e.g. drought, cyclones, hurricanes, monsoons and what not.
I speak for the middle band of these Isles. Scotland gets fairly consistent snowfalls annually and the north west is much wetter than the south and east
The thing that is most disruptive is snow. We get snow over most of the UK rarely. The last white Christmas when snow fell and lay on Christmas day was 2010 although some fell in 2017 but it didn't reach the ground before melting. If snow falls, and it is usually in January/February, because deep snow (1=-3 inches and up) is rare, we don't have the infrastructure to deal with it. Main roads are gritted with salt and sand to melt snow/ice and usually stay open but the rest of the nation grinds to a virtual halt - many trains stop (all are late!), people can't get places by road and all manner of things just crumble when there is snow. Snow ploughs are a rarity except in the N. of Scotland. Around 2012 we had a bad fall of snow and I was with a potential client only about 25 miles from home. It was snowing when I left in the morning but I arrived only about 10 minutes longer than normal as the route was all main roads. The snow had broadly stopped by mid afternoon when my meeting ended. Nevertheless it took me 9 hours to get home!! Thank goodness I had prepared with food and a flask of hot coffee in the car.
We have had very rainy weather and storm force conditions quite a lot in the last few months. Increasingly we are getting storms over the UK. The ground is saturated so any new rain goes straight into the rivers and often low lying roads and housing by rivers are inundated causing people to be flooded out of their homes and journeys subject to long diversions to avoid the floodwater. Many fields round our village are wet through and crops ruined by being underwater. This may affect the availability of vegetables in the spring. 100% cloud cover is very normal and we don't give it a second thought. Darkness falls around 4pm this time of year.
Still, when spring peeps through at the end of March, we are a green and verdant land and if we had more sunshine, we'd be a very desirable part of the world to live in. Mid you, our infrastructure doesn't cope with drought very well either. Because we have a lot of rain, our water companies do little to stop leaks and preventable outflows. Consequently a lot of eservoirs dry up very fast if there is a long period (say 6-8wekks) of very low or no rain. But the UK is not bad by comparison with some places because our weather, whilst depressing, is not usually too severe.
You should come and visit and sample it for yourself. Unlike AZ you can't just strip off any day and be warm and dry. Probably 50% of days in the UK are too cold to warrant nakedness outdoors. But equally, when we can get naked, it's a greater pleasure because of the restrictions we live with.
John
