Endless summer brings some vintage fine whines

We’re just a third of the way into summer but we’ve already had an endless summer so warm it feels like we’ve moved to Barbados.

Last Tuesday the city was so humid you could steam rice in my living room. Out in “the country” it was so hot even the bugs were too exhausted to bite. You could hear them in the woods, murmuring:

“No way I’m sucking anyone’s blood today. You do it – I’m taking a nap.”

For decades we Canadians froze, shivered and whined 11 months a year and dreamed of a brief hot summer in July. But now that we have an endless summer we’ve adapted quickly and started to whine about the heat instead.

I’ve heard numerous complaints from people who think it’s too hot, too humid, too dry or just too weird. We’ve become heat-o-phobes, obsessed with keeping cool.

How did it happen? Back in my youth Mr. Sun was our best friend, a warm, beaming presence we soaked up like … sunshine.

As adults baked under aluminum reflectors like slabs of meat, kids spent all day outside slathered in suntan oil to get dark faster. At night mums put calamine lotions on our burns – then our skin peeled and we started over again.

But then in the 1980s the ozone hole opened and everything suddenly changed. Suntan oil quickly transformed into Sunblock 97 as the sun went from friend to enemy.

We Canadians already used the Windchill Factor to make winter sound more frightening. Now we invented the Humidex to make summer sound menacing too.

Take my friend “Weather Guy” who tracks the Humidex hourly, like a stockbroker does the Dow Jones Average, warning: “Sure, the thermometer just says 25.8 degrees, but the humidity is 83.6 and when you calculate the Sunshine Quotient, the Low Cloud Density Index and the Wind still factor the Humidex is probably over 42. “No way I’m going out in that.” The ozone hole eventually vanished but the Humidex remained – and gradually led to the typical sun-scare paranoia we saw last week. Our winter “snow days” have spawned summer “heat days” with extreme weather warnings that sound as scary as a tsunami.

“DANGER! HEAT ALERT! Do not mow lawn, do not jog, walk fast, or talk fast. Seniors and children should stay inside malls, cars or cupboards and drink 500 ounces of fluid an hour. All others should avoid direct sunshine and use vitamin D, the sunshine drug, instead.”

Perhaps the greatest factor in making us scared of the sun was the spread of air conditioning – a miracle that civilized Florida and the Southern U.S. But in recent years it’s spread everywhere, turning more and more Canadians into summer weather wimps – like me.

Men usually control the air-con dial in offices, movie theatres and big stores where they like a “meatlocker” climate that causes many women to wear sweaters to work on sweltering days. It’s the great air-conditioning divide.

My wife is typical. She comes home from her freezing office and flings open our windows to let in the warm air. But I’ve become a typical heat-fearing guy who wilts in the warmth.

During hot spells imigrate downstairs all day to my air-conditioned office where the temperature is cold enough to see my breath, while my wife stays upstairs in her own steamy microclimate.

I live in the Arctic while she lives in the jungle – and our son travels back and forth from Alaska to the Amazon in one flight of stairs.

At night we compromise. There’s no air-con in the bedroom but my side of the bed has a fan the size of a windmill placed 3 mm from my nose and set so high I have frost on my eyebrows.

On the far side of the bed, she is covered in blankets and dressed warmly enough to climb Everest. But come morning I’m the one complaining about the heat.

The final stage in our country’s climate conversion is fear of global warming, which has made the heat not only bad for us – but bad for the planet, too.

The most common complaint I’ve heard this summer is that the weather is too warm and sunny – so something is obviously wrong. “It’s too weird – I can’t enjoy it.”

The nicer it feels, we worse we feel.

Montrealers! This is the summer we and our frostbitten ancestors dreamt of for centuries. So worry about the planet and turn off your air conditioner if you like, but enjoy the moment and soak up the sun while it lasts.

I’m sure seven weeks of healthy London rain is coming our way soon that will be great for us, the environment and the planet.

And when it gets here you can bet we will never stop complaining.