Phew, what a scorcher: why Britain can’t chill out in summer

Asweating character in Iris Murdoch’s The

Sandcastle was clearly experiencing a week like this one when she observed that ‘“in other countries they just have the summer time. We have ‘heatwaves’.”

Indeed, in much of the world, hot summer weather fails to shock. Sweat is common, and tactics for keeping cool – from window shutters and air conditioning to ceiling fans – are well developed. Nor do the residents of, say, Avignon or Athens immediately strip and race to the nearest deckchair when the mercury soars – their goal is to keep cool and stick to shade.

Here, despite its ( generally) annual occurrence, hot weather sends us into paroxysms of fervour, with every heatwave like our first.

In Los Angeles, weather headlines are currently focused on wildfires, caused by the sun, but in Britain we struggle to get past the simple fact that it’s really warm outside. Worryingly warm, for some. In London, Tube passengers are told by anxious transport chiefs to carry water at all times and warned about heatstroke.

In fact, there is almost nothing that cannot be explained by a British heatwave. Scorching conditions are regularly invoked in accounts even of grievous criminality, such as the London riots of 2011 and last month’s violent disorder in Hyde Park.

Oscar Wilde loathed our preoccupation with weather, calling it “the last refuge of the unimaginative”. But this was unfair. Britain’s intense relationship with meteorology is born of genuine geographical uniqueness. It is old, complicated and quirky.

This is a temperate island, plonked between the Atlantic and the European land mass. Five air masses meet over us, drawn from polar, tropical, continental and maritime sources. They are constantly fighting it out, resulting in our restless skies and eventful forecasts. Add the Gulf Stream plus island moisture, and failure to produce reliably boiling summers is inevitable.

It’s understandable that British temperature extremes become obsessions: they are, after all, short sharp shocks that transport us into the unknown. A glimpse of such sunny paradise on British earth is truly intoxicating.

The British fascination with very hot weather is not new; and has – contrary to Wilde – produced some of the most charming writing on record. When the English chaplain Charles Robson arrived in Aleppo in 1624, he wrote home of the “most subtle air, cloudless skies and great heat” that meant fevers were “speedily cured’’. In 1669, an astonished English traveller in Morocco described weather so hot it “melted a chocolate cake”.

Forecasters today may not invoke melting cakes, but their patter is soothing none the less, wrapping the nation in a cottony sweep of meaningless change and reminding us that, deep down, we know we’re on to a good thing.

This has been a stressful year, full of catastrophes, but a few minutes of the weatherman reading the skies and you feel the blood pressure drop.

Now, thanks to personal weather apps, we can bring the calming intricacies of the forecast to our own postcodes.

But as this week’s ecstatic headlines and stampeding swimmers confirm, no microclimate update – however accurate – will ever get close to the truly British excitement that comes with a big, sweaty, national sizzler.