AMONG the many, many emails that came into our offices in the past week, there have been many salutary exchanges.
Usually, it’s a comment about the weather – we are Brits after all.
So many of these missives have been heatwave aware.
Some are looking forward to bit of sunshine. And who can blame them when us Brits have whole memes and jokes about British summertime lasting hours, rather than days, or us needed to turn the sun on and off again to try and get a few rays heading our way.
And long before the internet was even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes, there were numerous jolly postcards showing torrential rain with the legend ‘summer in Cleethorpes’, or whichever town you happened to be vacationing in.
But there’s also those for whom the forecast is bad news.
I’m a veteran of several heatwaves.
The earliest was 1976. Someone on Twitter last week asked how those of us were around then coped.
This was, for those who don’t remember, the summer when water was rationed and there were queues for the stopcocks in the streets.
So what was top of my list of memories? Not a lot to be honest. I was in the business of soiling nappies and drinking milk. At a push, there might have been some rusks in there too, but to be fair, wearing very little but underwear and sticking to cold, nourishing drinks has been this week’s modus operandi too.
The summer of 1989 was a scorcher, and the first time that many of us started to think seriously about global warming. It seems hard to believe now, but leading the way was the Daily Mail, who wanted us to go green and save the seals.
And the head of a water firm encouraged us to have a bath the size of an egg cup, shared with a loved one.
Summers since have seen the temperatures rachet up, as the University of Reading’s climate stripes diagram so aptly shows.
And winters, well, they’re just as record breakingly warm.
In fact, in the *cough* 26 years since I’ve been a resident of this neck of the woods, we’ve had cold spells, but not snow that has fallen for several days and then stuck around. So my ambition of building an igloo remains on the ‘things to do before I shuffle off this mortal coil’ list.
Just thinking about those colder days makes me feel a little warm inside, rather than hot, bothered and flustered.
There’s something rather romantic about pacing through the fog of autumn, leaves swirling around us, my unfeasibly long scarf blowing around like a kite.
And then there’s a brisk stroll through crisp winter’s days, where the breath lingers in the air and the there’s a sharp pain when you breath in as it’s so cold. Preferably, as Shakin’ Stevens would sing, snow is falling, all around us.
The fact that the brisk stroll is then topped off with a warm hot chocolate by the fireplace is neither here nor there, as my stomach surely does not testify to.
All of which might give you some indication as to my lines in the email missives about this week’s heatwave.
When I had more hair, back in the full flush of youth – well, OK, back in the summer of 1976, it was auburn. Which is a notch away from ginger. Which means that like a vampire, the slightest bit of sun and I turn to dust.
I’ve only got two skin tones: normal, and lobster pink, and the switch is faster than a Porsche can go 0-60mph.
Once the thermometer gets into double figures, it’s too hot for me.
Roll on autumn. As long as moths haven’t eaten my Dr Who scarf.
