On Facebook, my number of ‘friends’ numbers no more than a few dozens, most of whom are family members scattered across various parts of England. However, as well as keeping in contact with cousins, Facebook does offer the chance to follow random pages. One of the pages which seems always fascinating is ‘Simon shows you maps.’

On Monday, the map showed the wettest and the sunniest places in Great Britain. Sharing it with friends, I commented that Miss Rabbage would have been delighted with such a map. Our village is at the heart of an orange area on the map, orange denoting high levels of sunshine and low levels of rain.

At High Ham Primary School, fifty years ago, Miss Rabbage would teach us that as the rain clouds came in from the Atlantic, they would be pushed upward by the hills in the west of Somerset, Exmoor and the Quantocks and the Blackdowns, and the rain would fall there and not reach our village in the middle of the Levels.

The colourful map conversations recalled geography lessons at school and the drawing of diagrams that showed how relief rainfall happened. I have happy memories of such activities, the use of coloured pencils was obviously effective in ensuring the lessons remained in the memory.

I never knew whether we really were in a rain shadow, but perhaps the exact geographical facts were not that important. Perhaps it was the perception that mattered. Our view of our part of our home county was that it conformed to our own version of a Goldilocks principle, not that we would have understood the application of a fairy tale to human life.

We felt that we were far enough south to enjoy the best of English weather and that we were far enough north to be near the cities of Bath and Bristol. We felt we were far enough west to be away from the crowds and congestion of the areas around London and the Home Counties and that we were far enough east to escape the gridlock traffic jams of Devon and Cornwall that would be pictured on the television news on summer weekends.

Our village at three hundred feet above sea level was an ideal place to be, it was three hundred feet above the surrounding Levels which might disappear below lakes of flood water in winter, yet at three hundred feet it was never the sort of high ground that might suffer frost and ice in winter time.

The 2021 map of sunshine and rainfall adds a firm meteorological dimension to our Goldilocks principle.