In July, I bought some sunglasses. Six weeks later I look back and smile at my optimism. The month just gone has been the wettest August anyone in Britain can remember, and in some places the wettest August since landowners, country doctors and village clergymen began to keep reliable records of rainfall in the 18th century. Not only the wettest, but perhaps also the darkest. Thick bands of cloud blocked out the sun. As usual, we spent most of our holiday on the west coast of Scotland. The sunshine is never reliable there but this year the sun attained the status of an ancient myth. Science told us it lay over our heads, but where was the evidence other than a watery light that dimmed even more when the night came on? The clouds crept so low, sliding down the hillsides, that they almost touched the sea and it was difficult to distinguish mist from cloud and cloud from rain. Our days began with the patter of rain on the roof tiles and ended with the same autumnal sound. We lit fires in the grate and switched on the lights.

I imagine that monsoons in the Assam hills must be like this; Cherrapunji was said to be the wettest place on earth, many times wetter than even the worst British summer. But at least in Cherrapunji there is a confirmed pattern. Rain falls mainly in the morning and mainly during the months of its two monsoons, say June to November. Also, we know why: hot air flows over the plain of Bengal until a range of hills forces it higher, where its moisture condenses. Roughly speaking, that is; I am no metereologist. But the Scottish west coast is much less predictable — there is no good time to go or to stay away — and the origins of a recent succession of particularly bad summers are mysterious. Climate scientists blame a shift northwards in the high atmosphere’s jet stream, which has brought a series of depressions across the Atlantic and may (or may not) be the result of global warming. All I can say is that as I sat dripping and sneezing on the island of But it was hard to take the last phrase seriously. The days have gone when Britain imagined — blissfully — that climate change meant only that in future we could grow grapes in Yorkshire and eat outdoors in December. The effects are both less benign and less certain.

What does rain do to the soul? My wife likes it and frequently points out that the beauty of the Scottish landscape — the green pastures, the heather on the mountains, the bracken, the waterfalls — owes everything to rain (in this mood, she can sound like the Tagore song that trills the joys of the monsoon). All true, indubitably, but those of us who associate the word ‘summer’ with ‘sun’ can still feel cheated by a season that’s meant to be the opposite of winter. Rain makes us feel melancholy, reflective, depressed.

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It may be that the weather is to blame for Alistair Darling’s recent reflections on the British economy. Darling is the chancellor of the exchequer. Like the prime minister, Gordon Brown, he’s Scottish. Chancellors of the exchequer are traditionally upbeat no matter the circumstances. What this means in practice is that the chancellor needs to be good at lying, or at least concealing the whole truth. In an interview with the Guardian, Darling broke with this convention. Britain, he said, was facing economic conditions that were “arguably the worst they’ve been in sixty years” and that people were “pissed off” with the Labour government. All he was doing was stating the obvious, but the skies opened, the heavens fell, and the pound declined sharply against the euro and the dollar. A largely unfriendly and over-excitable media played its usual part, of course: the story was puffed up and distorted and Darling was portrayed as a man undermining his prime minister and talking down the prospects of his country. But Darling is an able politician who must have known how the media would behave, so the question is, what led to him to speak with such unusual frankness?

He was holidaying in a croft on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis at the time, an unlikely place to take a holiday unless you come from there. The Guardian flew their woman all the way from London to see him. Now, there are many things to be said for Lewis. The people are hospitable; Gaelic is spoken — Lewis is the language’s main redoubt; the landscape can be stunning in its wildness; and the island has hung on bravely to a faith in Calvinism, long absent from the rest of Scotland, which forbids amusement or even public transport on a Sunday. It would be hard, however, to praise its climate — wet and windy, with Atlantic breakers crashing to the shore after a long uninterrupted journey from Nova Scotia. Residents drink quite a bit and who would blame them? The weather and its twin escapes, the bottle and the Bible, sometimes led in the past to a mental breakdown diagnosed in the mainland’s hospitals by the name ‘the Lewis Depression’.

Any man could grow a little melancholy here. Exposure to the elements — wind, rain, waves — might also lead him to be franker about things usually cloaked in the petty political evasions of the London TV studios. My guess is that the weather encouraged the chancellor to tell the truth. You might say it was the silver lining in this summer’s perpetual cloud.

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When the Anglicans at St Mark’s Church in Gorton, East Manchester, started a football team in 1880, their intention was to provide a muscular pastime for young working-class men as a distraction from the unhealthy temptations of alcohol, tobacco, sex and crime. By the end of the 19th century, the team had become a club with professional players: Manchester City FC. Over the next hundred years, Manchester City had an uneven career in the English league, where it was usually overshadowed by its city rivals, Manchester United. Last week, it suddenly became the world’s richest football club when it was bought by an Abu Dhabi syndicate funded by the principality’s ruling Al Nahyan family.

Foreign ownership of England’s Premier League sides is by now an old story. Nine out of 20 teams are owned by billionaires based abroad — Manchester City’s previous owner was the former Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra (wanted in Thailand on corruption charges), who sold the club to the Arabs for £200 million. But even by the standards of the spendthrift Premier League, the money and ambition that lie behind Abu Dhabi’s acquisition are spectacular. The first act of the new owners was to outbid Chelsea for the Real Madrid and Brazil forward Robinho. They paid £34.2 million for him. At which point Chelsea’s owner, the Russian Roman Abramovich, ceased to be the richest influence in English soccer, despite his many billions gained dubiously from Russia’s oilfields. The Arabs say they will spend anything it takes to establish Manchester City as one of Europe’s leading clubs — even £200 million a season on transfers when big clubs such as Liverpool manage on £20 million.

Let’s not ask why. Like cricket in India, the answer has everything to do with Himalayan scales of vanity, ‘trophy brands’ and television revenue — not to speak of piles of cash seeking useful employment. The more interesting speculation is historical: could the good people of St Mark’s in 1880, saving up to buy their leather ball, ever have imagined that they were one of the building blocks of global capitalism?And yet in a different way they already were. Several thousand men in east Manchester worked in Beyer Peacock’s locomotive works, which exported to every corner of the empire, including India. As for Manchester United, a few miles west across the city, it was founded as the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway’s team in the locomotive suburb of Newton Heath. That railway made a lot of its profit from hauling raw cotton from Liverpool docks and returning finished cotton goods for export, at a time when, in the words of J.B. Priestley, Lancashire made every dhoti in India.

In other words, the local economy was already globalized. A little of the profits generated found their way into wages and then into working-class pleasures, the biggest of which was football. Today the old industries are finished — gone almost as though they never had been. Alone, it is the spectator sport their workers invented that has prevailed, and stands now as their unrecognizable monument.