Furnace Friday
How the heatwave will change Britain
Don’t panic! It may be hot but it’s not that hot. No wonder the Australians have been mocking our hysteria surrounding what are, by their standards, pathetically low temperatures. The hottest it ever got in Oz was 123.3F (50.7C) compared with our lowly peak, 101.3F (38.5C), in Faversham, Kent, in 2003. In January, Sydney was melting, at 117.2F (47.3C).
Today, the temperatures are predicted to hike up to past 98F (37C), leading many to dub the last day of the working week “Furnace Friday”. But the chances are we’ll look back at the summer of 2018 with great fondness, not lily-livered horror. As one reader wrote in our letter pages yesterday: “I’ve been waiting over 40 years for a repeat of the hot, dry and fun summer of 1976. Now it’s finally arrived please let me enjoy it…”
This is not, it seems, a sentiment shared by the Government. Going into nanny-state overdrive, MPS on the environmental audit committee have insisted that a few extra degrees are putting workers’ health at risk and harming productivity.
In fact, we humans are fantastically nimble at adapting to the weather. As I discovered when writing a book about the English character, it is the weather – along with our island status – that chiefly dictates our national behaviour. If we have a warmer future ahead, we don’t have to fear it, we will change with it. National stereotypes will shift after 2,000 years of clichés about the frozen north.
In 100AD, Roman legionaries – from
Gaul, in the south of
France – wrote from Northumberland, longing for the best Italian
Massic wine.
Our climate may not be Italian yet – but still, once famous as beer country, we are gradually morphing into wine country. In vineyards in southern England, we’re getting closer to emulating the standards of Champagne. The French wine region, 80 miles south of our vineyards, has developed a shorter growing season as temperatures climb. Meanwhile, our chalk soils, combined with the rising heat, are producing vastly improved sparkling wine. We’re already becoming more continental in how we drink, too. For decades, northern countries – particularly in Scandinavia – binged on booze to get through long, cold, dark winters. Yet millennials now drink less, and have seemingly learnt to enjoy the company of the opposite sex, Mediterranean-style, without having to get plastered. British awkwardness between the sexes goes back to our early Industrial Revolution and our huge coal reserves. Men were separated from women – in the mines and in the factory. Thus the great British pub – which, until half a century ago, was
predominantly a men-only preserve.
Meanwhile, on the Continent, rural peasant economies lasted longer, allowing for a greater degree of family life, with the mixed sexes working together; while the gentler climate produced happier, mixedsex, al fresco socialising.
With a warming climate – along, admittedly, with those handy terrace heaters – the British have slowly moved outdoors, increasingly eating al fresco at home and in restaurants.
The old-fashioned British boozer is disappearing, replaced by continental-flavoured gastro bars and coffee shops. And while the British Food Revolution has been exaggerated – things have certainly improved. Before Elizabeth David came along, the British could only buy olive oil at a chemist, and I still remember taramasalata as wildly exotic when it arrived in the Islington Sainsbury’s in the Eighties.
As temperatures rise, our sartorial habits will change, too. For decades, Italians have matched beautiful suits with sockless ankles. I dispensed with socks this summer, for the first time, and it has been wonderfully liberating – even if I am mocked at parties.
We used to be so good at dressing for the tropical corners of the British Empire, protected by cooling linens and cottons. But we’ve lost the knack now, racing out into the sun to roast ourselves a deep crimson and marinate our bodies in lager. Future heatwaves may bring back our natural chic in the heat style.
The same applies to sport. We invented the world’s greatest sports – but often don’t have the weather to play them in. Now we do.
And what about our greatest invention, the picnic? The first picnic description is in The Vicar of
Wakefield (1766), where Oliver Goldsmith described its most distinctive ingredient, “discomfort”.
So enjoy this all-too-rare heatwave. Embrace its English wines, rain-free summer sports and discomfort-free picnics. You have nothing to lose but your socks.
Harry Mount is author of How England
Made the English (Penguin). To order your copy for £8.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk