We Brits are famous for talking about the weather. It’s true, we do. There’s a good reason for this obsession. Although our little island rarely experiences the extreme weather other places have to contend with, ours is far from consistent. There are no guaranteed warm, dry summers, winter doesn’t necessarily mean snow, rain is always around the corner and it’s quite normal to get all four seasons in one day. When extremes do happen, we’re really not geared up for it. Our houses don’t have air conditioning and there are no snow ploughs or chains for car tyres. The last week has been a tad on the warm side. In fact, the Met Office recorded a record UK temperature of 40.3°C on 19 July. The media gleefully catastrophised. There were headlines like ‘How the heatwave broke Britain,’ and ‘Gates of Hell are opening.’ If it hadn’t been so warm, the men with sandwich boards would surely have been walking up and down, proclaiming that the end of the word was nigh. When people began saying it was far worse than the famous summer of 1976, eye-rolling in our house reached danger levels.
Continue reading Twenty-two, seventy-six and a ninety-nine
