Paper Monitor
11:48 UK time, Tuesday, 17 July 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Above and beyond all else, one complaint has dominated British discourse in recent weeks - the weather. Can't something be done?
It's a refrain that the Times' leader takes, tongue-in-cheek, as its own, as part of its continuing "campaign" (first launched last week) for an end to the drizzle.
"There has been an Arab Spring," today's column . "Now there must be a British Summer."
It's a witty and amusing idea. So witty and amusing, in fact, that it also occurred to the Independent's Steve Richards.
He
This rotten, rainy, grey, sodden summer demands a response. It must be more than impotent groans of despair or annoyingly defiant calls to carry on as if the sun were shining. It must take the form of a radical, new approach to public policy for a stormy island that does not get summers, yet acts as if it does.
Paper Monitor gets the idea. And then turns to the Sun - the newspaper, that is, not the celestial entity, obscured as so often it currently is - which, it seems, has also been thinking along similar lines.
"The Sun has decided enough is enough and today takes action on behalf of our readers to sort out what is rapidly becoming the worst summer EVER," a double-page spread begins.
The tabloid has commissioned Canon David Meara of St Bride's Church in Fleet Street, London, to compose a prayer beseeching the almighty for better weather.
It also has a cut-out petition that the Met Office puts a stop to "unacceptable" climactic conditions.
All very droll, but there can be too much of a good thing. Paper Monitor blames the Times' Janice Turner for sparking all this on Saturday with her call for a
The 
