Britain on the boil
With its summer weather taken from other places, Britain blows hot and cold
It is the end of June and it has to be hot in Gurgaon, where I live. The problem is that I'm not in Gurgaon, but in London, and the temperature today is going to be 34°C, making it hotter than Gurgaon with its pre-monsoon showers.
Britain has long been in climate change denial of its own climate. It persists in thinking of itself as a cold country. And it is a cold country for most of the year.
But then, all of a sudden, the sun will burst through the grey skies, temperatures will soar, and the tabloid headlines will go into a frenzy about how it's going to be hotter than Spain, and the south of France, and Sicily.
And the nanny state will exhort people to carry water with them, and get off the bus, or the Tube if they feel faint, and everyone who's been moaning and grumbling about the wet and cold, will now moan and grumble about the horrid heat.
It happens every year, regular as a Swiss clock. But by common consensus, Britain believes itself to be a cold country or at least a temperate one. Hot? No fear, not us. We don't do heat.
So when the heat wave does strike, everyone's caught unprepared. Homes don't have ceiling fans. Bars, restaurants, and most public transport lack air conditioning. And people get bowled over as much by astonishment as by the heat, like ninepins in a game of skittles.
Britain's denial of being a hot country, even temporarily, is both understandable and factually correct. Britain is not a hot country; the extreme heat waves it regularly endures are all borrowed from foreign shores.
What the weather reports describe as a 'plume of hot air' will come whooshing in from North Africa, or some such outlandish place, and smite the country with sunstroke.
Britain's borrowed heat from distant climes is analogous to the wealth it euphemistically borrowed in a fit of absent-mindedness from its former colonies and forgot to return. British heat? 'Course not. It's only borrowed. Like the Kohinoor.
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