Morning:
8°c
With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Latest: Gordon Brown apologises for his poor handwriting and for misspelling the name of a dead soldier in a letter to the young man’s mother
More...
Yellow, the colour of spring
Last updated at 22:22pm on 16.04.07The calendar says we're only half way through April. The fields full of brilliant blooming oilseed rape, the cracked earth and the panting dogs tell a different story.
While golden yellow crops bloomed in Wimborne, Dorset, the warm weather was bringing cafe society to town and city centres.
Scroll down for more
Yellow fever in Wimborne
Diners spilled out of cafes and restaurants to eat and drink at pavement tables late into the night.
The South again saw the highest temperatures yesterday, with Southampton touching 77f (25c). This contrasts with the monthly average of 57f (14c).
Off the Cornish coast, the warm weather almost spelt disaster for a 12ft basking shark after it entered the shallows weeks earlier than usual and became snared in fishing nets.
A bright field of rape, blooming unseasonably early
The harmless creature, which feeds on plankton, was close to death when divers found it 100 yards off Newlyn. They spent 30 minutes cutting it free and it swam away suffering minor rope cuts to its nose, tail and fins.
The Met Office said the weather will drop to a more seasonable 59 to 61f ( 15 to 16c), as a cold front heads south down the country.
Despite the cracked earth, water companies are not yet thinking of repeating last year's widespread hosepipe bans.
Thirsty work: Beside the River Arun in West Sussex
A spokesman for Water UK, an umbrella body for the country's water companies, said a winter of above average rainfall meant a repeat of last year's chronic shortages was unlikely.
"The current situation is we are pretty good, far better than this time last year. We have had seven months of above average rainfall and we haven't had that for two winters."
Reader views (6)
Several years ago I was driving somewhere in Kent on a warm sunny day when I suddenly ran into a bank of fog. It was the first car that I had owned that showed the outside temperature, and it dropped from 18 degrees down to -1c for around a minute before we came out of the other side. Really weird.
- Paul, London
And what exactly is the point of oilseed rape? It stinks.
- Paul, London
I suppose we are going to be told it's global warming next, and that we should pay more tax on our cars and holidays. Strange then that it was hotter in 1949!
- Stephen, London
This story would have you believe that the weather was terrible in Blackpool.
The sun shone strong all day, we went out for the day just for a walk along the front, it was a hot day, and a very strange 15 minutes or so the coastline was drowned in fog. It was one of the strangest things I've ever seen, the fog was extremely cold and left your skin feeling wet. There were hundreds of people sunbathing on the beach and on the piers so others must have seen it. Anybody else find it immensly freaky to just come and go like that?
- Mark, Preston
Someone tell Thames water it's going to rain, they can put out a few buckets and sell the stuff to us at extortinate prices, then not give it to us.
- Brian, Swindon
Why would anyone go to Blackpool for the weekend anyway? It's full of Northern stag and hen do's, the food's awful, the weather's awful and the place is awful.
- Trevor Roll, London
