Here comes the 30C scorcher!

Hottest day of the year predicted this week as summer FINALLY arrives across the country

AFTER the soggiest start to summer on record, the sun’s arrival was long overdue. So when it finally beamed down over the weekend, crowds flocked to beaches and parks to make the most of it.

And the good news is the first week of the school holidays is set to be a scorcher, with forecasters predicting the hottest day of the year so far on Wednesday, when the mercury could reach 86F (30C) for the first time this year.

It would beat the previous top temperature of 84.7F (29.3C) in the Scottish Highlands in May, in what was technically still springtime.

Day trippers took full advantage of the weekend’s change in weather, as temperatures peaked at 74F (23.5C) in London and north Wales.

Visitors to Sidmouth, Devon, yesterday morning enjoyed the dramatic sight of thick sea fog hovering over the seafront, caused when warmer air condenses over the cooler sea. By lunchtime the sun had burned the fog away.

At Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, visitors cooled off by paddling in the Cascade, the 300- year- old man- made waterfall at the stately home.

In Blackpool families were treated to a spectacular meteorological event in which the sun appeared to be surrounded by a halo or circular rainbow. The phenomenon occurs when sunlight is reflected through wispy cirrus cloud. It happens around five times a month but is usually obscured by clouds.

In a more unusual incident yesterday, a holiday beach was cordoned off after a landslip sent more than 1,000 deadly bombs and rockets embedded in the cliffs for more 60 years tumbling on to the sands.

The East Yorkshire beach of Mappleton, near Hornsea, was used as an RAF target practice range during the Second World War. The ‘highly volatile’ arsenal, including rockets and mortar bombs, is being cleared over the next few days. The beach was empty at the time of the landslip and has been placed under 24-hour police guard. The weekend was also marred by tragedy after a man drowned in a tombstoning accident in the Lake District. On Saturday emergency services were called to Devil’s Bridge over the Lune river after the 22-year-old failed to surface after jumping in. His body was found shortly after.

On the same day a pilot died after his light aircraft smashed into a cliff at Sheep Rock, Nancekuke, a beauty spot near Portreath, Cornwall.

Met Office forecaster Helen Waite said the country would enjoy warmer weather this week, but added: ‘ We are seeing a North- South split in the weather, with southern parts staying under high pressure.’

The heat isn’t expected to last, with cooler weather arriving on Friday.

■ At least 37 people died in Beijing in the heaviest rainstorm to hit the Chinese capital in six decades.

Saturday’s storm flooded roads and left 80,000 passengers stranded at the main airport as the city was deluged by six-and-a-half inches.

One township, in western Fangshan District, was hit by 18in.

YESTERDAY, I put my head out of the door, then hastily put it back in again. Something was wrong. The sky had gone all funny. I did not get the usual thousand-gallon water salute. It had stopped raining.

There were even glimpses of that weird round orangey thing — fledgings have completed flight training without ever seeing it — oh yes, the sun.

For the past two months, warmth and bright light have been absent without leave from most of the British Isles. The sole exception was northern Scotland. When I briefly sallied up there to fish, salmon were flopping about on the rocks of a barren river bed, and everybody except me was dancing in a bikini.

Down south, however, this has been a summer for hibernation, and jolly miserable, too. We last had lunch in the garden back in March. There are cobwebs on the barbecue.

Weeks back, my wife Penny insisted that I stop wasting money on warming the swimming pool and, instead, allow her to switch the central heating back on. What is worse, many of our acquaintances blame this entire course of water torture on me.

Back in April, they point out, I wrote an article complaining that the countryside was blighted by the drought, and that England’s green and pleasant land might never be the same again.

‘Since you did your damn rain dance,’ a friend said severely last week, ‘ the floods have never stopped. Could you now please oblige us by going to church on Sunday and asking for a time out?’

It is probably true that I overdid my prayers for water.

Back in June, we took children and grandchildren to an idyllic Devon seaside spot. I had forgotten what it is like to roam across beaches where the rain drives down so hard that each drop causes a spurt of sand to shoot three inches into the air.

I love crabbing with bits of bacon tied to rocks, but found it jolly difficult to hold the attention of my audience — the children, I mean, not the crabs, who did not seem to mind — when we were under God’s hose-pipe.

I am a passionate advocate of English seaside holidays. The sand is so much better than dry Mediterranean muck, and one is spared all those embarrassingly heavy, uncovered female breasts.

It is a self-serving lie by parents, that they take the family abroad for the kiddiewinks’ benefit. Nobody much enjoys foreign parts until they are at least ten and can ride a jet-ski.

BUT THIS summer, I admit, it was tough convincing tinies that playing board games in heavy sweaters in the living room of a rented house was as nice as — well, Spain or Tuscany or Florida.

We sat warming our hands before the fire and trying to tell ourselves that we did not really want to be sipping aperitifs in shirt-sleeves on the terrace.

Driving was interesting, too: all those West Country dual carriageways where trucks whipped more water over us than a car wash, and the wind turned an umbrella inside- out faster than the Chancellor does his U-turns.

Back home, we agreed that we absolutely love Devon, but next time would be grateful for a view of the coast extending more than 50 yards through the mist. I shall be writing to Plymouth cinemas pleading for a more enlightened choice of movies in the holiday season, and packing a sun-ray lamp in the luggage.

Though my wife long ago gave up sunbathing, she says she still likes to kid herself that when she walks out of doors in July, she needs a hat to prevent herself from getting scorched, not soaked.

We live in the country — west Berkshire, as it happens — and usually spend a significant part of every summer’s day out of doors: swimming, playing tennis or wielding a trowel.

After the past couple of months, I am not sure I can still find my way to the kitchen garden, because we have seen so little of it. Our onions look all stalk and not much bulb.

Several lots of peas died of cold before we cajoled a few into germinating. Even now, they look unhappy, and the pigeons cannot be bothered with them.

The cauliflowers turned a peculiar green colour, and the less said the better about the fruit cage.

I have crawled around in boots and anorak trying to pick strawberries, but almost always lost the race with mould.

Meanwhile, in the beds, the poor roses have sagged under the weight of water; the peonies looked wonderful for about two hours, then became dark lumps of fudge.

I only know this from looking at them through a window: nothing would have persuaded me to get out there and weed or dead-head until precipitation stopped for more than ten minutes.

The croquet set has not even come out of its box, and the dogs are demanding Barbour jackets.

The worst thing though, you may agree, has been the darkness. With low cloud trapped overhead all day and every day, even at high summer one has needed lights on in the house to read a newspaper. I have seen brighter skies in November.

One afternoon, when the rain paused for breath, some friends who have a heavenly grass tennis court asked us to come and play.

It was hellish: not having covers like Wimbledon, the turf was waterlogged.

Balls died the moment they hit the ground; we are getting too slow to reach them without a little leeway from a bounce.

The weather has been worst for children, because it has played to their worst instincts for sitting supine before a screen. No parent could convincingly urge them to go out and play when they needed life-jackets to reach the sandpit.

They are obliged to see grownups getting progressively grumpier — and a lousy summer makes us all grumpy.

They cannot do the things all right-thinking children should be doing every June and July day: rolling on warm, dry grass; learning to swim outdoors; climbing trees, picnicking in Wendy- houses, playing ball games, defying wasps which — like bees — are in amazingly short supply.

I am an instinctive optimist, so I clutch at few pluses from the past couple of months’ biblical experience.

FISHING on the Kennet last week, it was a joy to see a full flow of water surging down, after many months of dry weather, and iniquitously excessive extraction of the river’s aquifers ( to supply a wide population area including Swindon), had reduced the river to a trickle.

The trees, visibly stressed back in April, now look contented. Indeed, the whole countryside has a lushness that contrasts delightfully with the arid yellowness of the Mediterranean.

But it has been a miserable business, living indoors through the longest days of summer; never once feeling able to have supper outside, to enjoy the scents of a balmy garden evening.

The scientists are threatening us with more seasons like this one, as the Arctic icecap shrinks. I suspect that they have no more idea about the weather than the rest of us.

But if, by chance, they are right; if this time next year we again find ourselves wearing waders to shop in the High Street, then a terrible fate threatens the Hastings family.

We might have to capitulate, and take that horrid and un-English thing — a foreign summer holiday.