England and Wales had the driest July in nearly 200 years, the U.K. weather service said, after a prolonged heat wave and almost no rain. [1] That is a Met Office month, not a Hose-pipe apocalypse. Nearly 200 years is the comparison the service chose. The paper does not invent a start year the headline omitted.

The same Tuesday Europe file places the number beside Greek and French fires, not beside a new U.K. wildfire death. [1] Drought is the British sentence. Flame is the continental one. Mixing them produces a fake United Kingdom inferno.

A driest July is a rainfall ledger. It is not a hosepipe ban by itself, not a reservoir percentage, and not a harvest loss the Met Office published in that headline. Those figures, if they exist Tuesday, belong in a later graph.

X will post cracked riverbeds as the end of English farming. The completed record is a month of rain that almost did not fall, in England and Wales, the driest in nearly two centuries of the service's comparison.

Scotland is not in that sentence. Northern Ireland is not in that sentence. [1] A United Kingdom drought headline that swallows four nations is a different paper's error.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo