Damn this hot weather to hell!

It’d just be nice if there was some acknowledgement that not everyone thinks these high temperatures are paradise

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“It’s going to be another beautiful day,” the weather person breezily intoned this morning, and that’s just about the only breeze we’re going to get over the next few days.

Upon hearing this I was tempted to throw the iPad at the wall. I’m sorry but it’s just Too. Damn. Hot.

There’s nothing good about this weather. It’s marginally preferable to the drizzly grey shroud London is cloaked in during the winter months, but only marginally.

For a start, we’re a pale skinned family. Prolonged sun contact is bad news, particularly for my wife and son, who have fair hair, blue eyes, and skin that burns to a bright red crisp in the absence of ultra high factor sun cream.

But it’s not just that.

For us, this weather is horrible. A sticky, sweaty, headache inducing nightmare. I know we’re not alone. It’s just that similar sun-haters whisper to each other in corridors when they think no one else can hear for fear of becoming social lepers. And it’s not just pale-faces who feel that way. I’ve a friend of Indian extraction who despises this sort of weather and grinds his teeth when he hears people gushing “but you must love this” at him. He really, really doesn’t.

There’s the rub. Dare to express sentiments like this (and I can just imagine some of the comments this articles is going to provoke) and people look at you as if you’ve gone out. Mention it on Facebook and the more radical of your sun loving friends will form a pincer movement and attack, characterising you an extreme curmudgeon who should just bugger off to Stockholm or Oslo, even Rejkavic. Actually, that’d be just gravy. The first two mentioned skandi capitals are currently basking in the low 20s (Celsius). It’s a bit nippy in Iceland, but what’s not to like about the midnight sun when you can wander around comfortably in a light jacket? And the crime fiction is, well, to die for (sorry, couldn’t resist it).

It’s not that I begrudge my friends their pleasure. It’d just be nice if there was some acknowledgement that not everyone thinks this is paradise.

The best of it is, we seem to have gone from miserable chill to inferno in the space of a couple of weeks. That seems to increasingly be the way of things. What on earth ever happened to spring time, when you might to shiver a bit in the cool night time air, but a single extra layer would see you right.

I’ve a glut of nice light jackets, shirts, and thin jumpers that I hardly ever seem to get to wear.

It’s not that I’m entirely immune from the compensations of the current heat wave. Beating the Aussies at cricket for starters. Evening racing at Windsor. The fact that cold lager can taste better than the most expensive Michelin starred meals London can serve up. Our children’s joy in an ice cream or in the paddling pool in our back garden.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s simply Too. Damn. Hot. And it looks like it’s going to stay that way until, well, until it’s Too. Damn. Cold again.