The new year in the UK began with warnings of cold times to come.

For once, this wasn’t only a metaphor.

BBC News reported that forecasts of snow across the country meant that there was “a risk of rural communities being cut off, schools being closed, and power cuts, as well as widespread travel disruption”.

Then, last week, as power outages hit the Midlands, the South West of England, and Wales, it was announced that Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool airports had been closed after their runways were covered by heavy falls of snow – and warnings of expected flooding were issued across the country.

We British are of course notorious for fretting about the weather. As people who are known to be emotionally reserved and socially withdrawn (except when fueled by copious quantities of alcohol), we like to shy away from conversations of any personal, moral, or philosophical depth when encountering strangers – or indeed in the company of most of our friends and acquaintances – and prefer instead to engage in small talk about the minutiae and trivia of everyday life.

Some of my countrymen tend to share their views on the latest football results (“that referee must have been blind… we were robbed”) or politics (“the government is a bunch of crooks… close the borders, bring back national service, capital punishment, and the lash”).

But a rather safer – and a rather less contentious – focus of casual conversation is the weather.

The “good old British weather” gives us the thing we like best: something to complain about. And – unlike football or politics – it’s something we can all agree on complaining about.

People may follow different sports teams and support rival political parties, but everyone agrees that we hate the weather.

It’s always either too hot or too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, or too grey. It’s an experience of typically British disappointment that we can all share. It’s what passes for a national culture around here.

Disappointment is our default mode, somewhere between a national hobby and a national obsession. We are naturally skeptical about our prospects, whether economic, political, or meteorological.

As a nation of pessimists, we expect to be disappointed. That is our defining paradox. We’d be disappointed if we weren’t.

The fleeting euphoria that surrounded the election of the new Labour government last summer had little to do with any misplaced faith in the honesty or abilities of Sir Keir Starmer. It was just a brief moment of relief that we’d got rid of the last lot.

That’s why we’ve managed to avoid the descent into fascism or fundamentalism. We just couldn’t summon the necessary enthusiasm.

Perhaps that’s partly down to our weather. After all, it really rains a lot. Glum is our go-to state.

This, after all, is the land in which tennis, cricket, picnics, beach holidays, sunbathing, music festivals, alfresco dining, and open-air theater have one thing in common. They are always very likely to be disrupted by rain.

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Yet we persist in hoping for the best, even though we know the weather is most likely to ruin our most optimistic summer plans for fresh-air fun.

And we continue (for the most part) to have faith that one of our home teams might win a global tournament – and to believe in moderate politics and liberal democracy, even though we’re invariably prepared to see our elected representatives fail to deliver on their promises. We know that the alternative would, after all, be much, much worse.

It's the same with our weather. Every summer we’re surprised by unexpected but entirely predictable downpours – just as Rishi Sunak was taken aback when he decided to step outside the door of Number 10 Downing Street last May to announce his intention to call a snap general election.

And, each winter, as our northern neighbors pull on their winter boots and change the tires on their cars, we find ourselves amazed and unprepared for the onset of snow and ice.

One might be more likely to sympathize with our lack of appropriate winter preparations if the United Kingdom were located in the middle of the Sahara desert, but our astonishment at the coming of cold weather is hardly so easily understandable in a place where it freezes and snows every year.

And it’s not just the winter that we’re not ready for. Even in the autumn, we find our railways disrupted by the fact that an average ten-thousand-ton train is so poorly designed that it can be stopped by leaves falling on the line. And in a wet and windy Spring, those same locomotives are stranded by mild flooding, as nobody thought to waterproof the electrical equipment lining their undercarriages.

Then, most summers, we don’t let people use hosepipes to water their parched gardens because our reservoirs are dry.

Yes, we’re obsessed by the weather, but we don’t do anything very much about it.

One might have thought that the susceptibility of an island nation – a maritime nation – to the caprices of inclement and swiftly changing weather conditions would have taught us to be ready for anything. And yet we’re not, and perhaps never have been.

It's not just because every schoolchild and every worker loves a snow day.

So is our failure to plan ahead a sign of apathy? Or is it the arrogance of a nation that still believes in its divine right to rule the waves?

Legend has it that, back in 1588, as an armada of Spanish warships was sighted on its way to invade England, Queen Elizabeth I’s favorite sailor Sir Francis Drake (half admiral, half pirate, and every kind of national hero) waited in the port of Plymouth and played a game of bowls. For once, our native complacency paid off and the weather proved to be on our side when a sudden storm sank Spain’s fleet. Today in Plymouth, a shopping mall (among other things) is named in his dubious honor.

Ever since then – that early moment of the naval supremacy which was to underpin the spread of an empire across much of the world – our lugubrious fatalism has masked an unfortunate and unattractive confidence in what the imperialist author Rudyard Kipling called the “white man’s burden” – the catastrophic “manifest destiny” of European or Anglophone culture to conquer the globe.

It is of course that certainty and that conceit which has led to the ubiquity and ultimately cataclysmic triumph of the industrial technologies of Western capitalism, a system – now keenly adopted (in various forms) almost universally – whose dirty inventions and dirtier practices have resulted in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and have heated our planet to a point at which the eventual extinction of our species and our civilizations now seems almost inevitable.

Climate change may have been brought about by a paradoxical mentality that combines optimistic denial with a pessimistic belief that we cannot do anything about it, by the arrogance and complacency of a culture that has never had to take responsibility for the mistakes it has made and the terrible things it has done.

But now it’s time to start talking about the weather again – not as the topic of idle chatter to pass the time and cover our social embarrassment, but as the most urgent and serious subject of them all.

But, of course, we mustn’t just talk. It’s time to act, to ensure that the impassioned environmental promises of prime ministers from Boris Johnson to Keir Starmer (whose green energy initiative seems to be fading into the policy shadows in the face of short-term fiscal exigencies) don’t end up as merely so much hot air.