Bodies are sprawled in the sunny park like the aftermath of a disaster

AFEW years ago, in my crofting days, I needed much new fencing, which commission fell to one Calum Angus, a perky youth who, when not so engaged, breeds shaggy, magnificent Highland cattle.

It took him months, as his stockman permitted, but for many days Calum Angus laboured on my acres. He bore posts and coils down through grazing thick with winter frost; stapled and strained through flurries of snow.

In the highest winds he would appear, toiling sturdily away as the sou’ wester wailed in the chimney pot, whipping the rushes and sending great breakers against the rockbound shore. Even on the foulest days, Calum Angus would arrive, tools in hand, a sturdy and distant figure as the rain came in thick horizontal curtains… except when it was hailing.

But there came a day of blue skies, when the skylark sang, the air shimmered and tar softened on the road; one so hot the dog actually declined a walk. And suddenly I got a text from Calum Angus.

‘I’ll not be up today,’ it proclaimed. ‘I can’t handle this weather…’

In recent days, as most of our country seems to have been towed south for a spell to bask off the Côte d’Azur, we are reminded anew just how few Scots can handle a heatwave – at least, in anything resembling normal human dignity.

Of this I was reminded the other day as I picked my way through Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield Links of a blazing afternoon, the park strewn en masse with sprawling, lightly clad bodies, as if I had arrived in the aftermath of some terrible disaster.

Young folk of indeterminate gender dozed on their fronts as significant others anointed bare backs with unguents. Men of a certain age stared skywards, worshipping the sun, vast naked tummies rolling by like the circumference of the Earth.

Other people’s pink, dreadful, yowling children stomped about, screeching for more Coke; smoke drifted over the scene from those tinny disposable barbecues as youths served up sausages simultaneously charred and raw.

A few – presumably students – had just enough vitality to stay on their feet and flip a Frisbee at each other in a desultory sort of way; the odd, behatted lady of a certain age sat on an elegant little tartan rug and read an improving book.

BUT for the most part the lieges just stripped, lolled and ever so gently burned, as I picked my way politely through languid legs like long white puddings.

Not that I am one to talk. Come winter, I am the last word in practical, sartorial elegance – thick trousers and redoubtable brogues, elegant topcoats and jackets, scarves and hats, ready to laugh at the worst of winter amidst Stornoway grey.

Come those days of simmering heat, the collared doves cooing contentedly in the poplars, and, in the words of Evelyn Waugh, ‘on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches are creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer’, I suffer an immediate wardrobe crisis.

I end up, usually, in an ensemble of walking shoes and hairy socks, old-man sky-blue shorts and a sort of hoody and a vast straw hat just perfect for mangling some wurzels and duly steal from the house hoping I meet no one I know.

I do draw the line at threequarter length shorts – which can only be worn for about three weeks in your twenties and are best, really, left to Cristiano Ronaldo – but I need a good length of honest bare leg or I pour with sweat.

It will be the Viking chromosomes, and long descent through generations of gannet- munching hardies at the last stop in north-west Europe before Iceland, but I am simply not designed for heat.

Not that long ago, of course, there were rules about those things. At my old school in Glasgow, when summer suns were glowing and of a particularly sapping morning, a great concession was sometimes decreed from on high – that we would be allowed to go tieless that day, as long as we dutifully knotted the polyester for the final trot home.

Teachers, daringly, dispensed with gowns and if conditions persisted we were even excused those mighty gartered kneelength hose and allowed to wear cuddly little ankle socks.

But I still remember two of my classmates being all but vaporised by the deputy head when he found them cavorting on the rugby pitch stripped to the waist. Or the occasion, 30 years ago on the very hot afternoon of a Free Church General Assembly, when a note was passed along the arch-eyebrowed pews to tell a young minister immediately to put his jacket back on.

Now, of course, we are in the devolved order of a new Scotland – all political correctness and Nationalist government – and have a kidult propensity to fall quite apart in serious heat.

Take the notorious propensity of the Scottish male to shed clothing at any opportunity, and the more eagerly – it appears – the more vastly his belly wobbles before him. It’s all part of a general, childish regression with such engaging symptoms as paddling in park fountains, slobbering at vast ice cream cones or buying enormous water pistols.

Eccentricity abounds. Last week, one householder was so intoxicated by the unusual sight of a large yellow object in the Scottish sky that she hung out her washing on Cathcart Road.

THE other day, startled money men in Glasgow’s Merchant City tweeted incredulous snaps of a draped figure – presumably female – sunbathing on the ledge of her third-floor tenement window.

Folk spend every free moment on any available patch of green. They call in sick and hit the beer garden, or – on – impulse – drive to the beach at Ayr.

We all know an old lady, and usually a large one who, each heatwave, materialises in the same strappy summer dress she has sported since 1976.

And I still remember the shock, more than four decades ago, when even my grandmother donned a pair of sunglasses; for months afterwards, I treated her with great suspicion.

But not everyone is cringing. With many confidently expecting our little land to enjoy its finest summer in four decades, and many now reluctant to enjoy cheap foreign beach holidays because of the terror threat in the likes of Turkey or Tunisia, VisitScotland bosses rub their hands at whole tourist possibilities.

‘It’s great to hear Scotland is forecast to have a hot summer. It may persuade many residents seeking holiday sun to have a staycation and explore the golden sandy beaches, mountainous paths or beautiful woodland found on their doorstep,’ enthused a spokesman.

‘Our surveys, however, continually show that the weather is of little consequence to visitors,’ he added, with that hedge-betting prudence redolent of an Edinburgh schooling.

‘Whether it’s stormy clouds over the mountains of Glen Coe or blue skies over coral beaches in Skye, visitors are in awe of the breathtaking scenery and visit in their droves for the landscapes, cities, culture and friendly people.’

Culture, these days, be less Burns and Scott than Irn-Bru, Mr Whippy and ‘taps aff’ – but may they bare it bravely.

And there is the abiding example of Calum Angus’s cows, who on any hot Lewis day reliably stop any passing tourists by, as is their photogenic wont, standing oxter-deep in a particularly pretty local loch.

Camera click as the beasts gaze lugubriously westwards, in silent assent with the local proverb: ‘Is beag a ghearaineas sinn, ge mor a dh’fhuilingeas sinn’ – ‘Little we complain, though we suffer much.’