Rain in June. The perennial disappointment of the British summer. So when it inevitably starts to pour down again later, cheer yourself by using one of these phrases from other countries which are roughly equivalent to 'it's raining cats and dogs.'

Welsh people say "Mae hi'n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn" meaning 'It's raining old ladies and sticks'. Or "Mae hi'n bwrw cyllyll a ffyrc" meaning 'It's raining knives and forks'.

In Afrikaans it's "Ou vrouens met knopkieries reen", or "It's raining old women with knobkerries" - and as knobkerries means clubs, that's essentially the same idiom as the Welsh.

Irish Gaelic is 'it's throwing cobblers knives'.

Cobblers show up a lot in other countries too - in Danish it's "Det regner skomagerdrenge", or "It's raining shoemakers' apprentices" and in German it's "Es regnet Schusterjungs" or "It's raining cobbler's boys."

In French, it's often it's raining ropes, but also frogs, nails or halberds. And - best of all - the thoroughly indelicate 'il pleut comme vache qui pisse' or 'like a pissing cow.'

Bulgarian, Croatian, Finnish, Latvian and Lithuanian, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and Polish all stick with 'it's raining buckets' in some form, although Serbian also has the dark but delightful 'the rain falls and kills the mice."

In Slovakian it rains tractors, and in the closely related Czech it rains wheelbarrows. In Estonia they say "it's even raining husbands."

In Portguese you might hear "Está chovendo a barba de sapo" which means "it's raining toad's beards". Frogs also show up in Polish.

Portuguese and Italian both use "It's raining as if God sends it" and in Arabic 'it rains as if from heaven." Whereas in Icelandic you say "Það rignir eld og brennustein" or "It's raining fire and brimstone."

Thai people say 'it's raining eyes and ears shut', while in China it's 'basin-bending rain.' The Japanese say "earth and sand are falling", because extremely heavy rain in Japan is so often associated with landslips.

In Haiti they say "Dogs are drinking in their noses".

And the prize for the most literal goes to the Koreans, who say "it's raining like a torrential downpour."