The Land of TWS (aka Ian)

Exactly. Settled or unsettled doesn't tell the whole story. It's all the different variaties that geographical features influence, the differences from location to location, night and day, winter and summer, all the different cloud types, weather types and transitions that comes with unsettled or settled. I'd prefer it if members in the Model Output Thread refered to the actual weather across the different regions of the UK instead of saying settled or unsettled. And of course, unsettled weather isn't always bad at all. For example, endless heavy rain and low cloud cover from depressions could be seen as bad weather but showery or even sunny spells in supposed unsettled periods can be better than even good scenarios that settled weather brings. There is indeed much more to British Weather than settled or unsettled.

Also, for example, right now outside the skies are clear with just a few small clouds and there's no wind. We are supposed to be in an unsettled period right now yet what we've got now is better than some of the stuff that settled weather brings. If only we could have our weather switching from settled to unsettled periods with lots of varied weather that's often pleasant, seasonal and at times extreme.

A fantastic read TWS! Even during that high pressure in March we had a lot of low cloud and fog for about 2 - 3 days.

Of course it depends on where you live, any High Pressure with an Easterly flow, gives sunny or bright weather here, Even Last July tended to be quite bright here, even if wasn't wall to wall sunshine.

For us unsettled weather with Atlantic flows tends to be the worst, at any time of year, and that's why I don't particularly like it, I have no particular desire for convective activity either.

My preference for a summer would be to have over half the summer sunny or bright with daytime maxes over 20c. So in nutshell sunny and warm is my preference.

I spent three years at Lancaster and I certainly recall a strong association between Atlantic flows and generally cloudy wet conditions there-. Slack, showery cyclonic conditions often gave a fair amount of sunshine and not many showers (Morecambe Bay tended to nullify convection, similar to the North Sea re. Tyneside, so Lancaster isn't great for convection/thunderstorm lovers either) but anything involving lots of fronts piling in off the Atlantic almost invariably gave frequent dull, wet and windy weather.
The general rule of thumb for anticyclonic weather was that anticyclonic/westerly types tended to be grey and drizzly (due to the moist tropical maritime air streaming in off Morecambe Bay) whereas high pressure combined with northerlies, easterlies or southerlies usually gave plenty of sunshine.

As a result I detected a stronger positive association between settled weather and sunshine in Lancaster than in Tyneside, although I identified two exceptions above. I would be even less keen on the "strong Azores High ridging into the south" scenario if I was still living over there as it tended to bring frequent grey drizzly weather to the Lancaster area.