The Romans came, saw and disliked our climate. Their historian Tacitus recorded of Britannia that its meteorology was ‘pretty foul’, largely because of its ‘extreme’ fog. They never did get the loveliness of fog, our signature weather.

The Inuit may have a sledge-worth of words for snow, but the British lexicon for fog is rich in number and sophistication. I give you ‘fret’ and ‘roke’ for English mist coming off the sea, whereas the Scots have their synonymous ‘haar’. Then there is ‘brume’, the mist that summons melancholy, bruma being the Latin for winter. As the fog expert Laura Pashby declares in her 2004 book, Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud , the white murk of the Tyne, the Fens, Dartmoor and the Fife coast is an intangible, but national ‘heritage’.

Fog. Difficult to

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