And with a bang, summer has arrived early. It’s the last week of May, and within two days the weather has gone from still needing to put the heating on in the evenings and wearing a coat out because it will probably rain, to face-melting heat and uncomfortable, sweaty nights.
It’s the same thing every year and we should be used to it by now, But as soon as the hot weather arrives, we still lie around sweating whilst commenting on how hot it is, before immediately going out to buy ingredients for a salad, a paddling pool because for some reason, the pool from last year has dissolved in the shed and enough bottles of beer to open a pub.
It’s also the time when I regret not having the air-con in my car topped up. Because in my head, it's only hot for a few weeks of the year, it’s not really worth it. But when those few weeks are here, I immediately realise that for the sake of a few weeks, it is, in fact, worth it. I sit feeling just an ounce of jealousy at the lights next to someone with their windows up, their hair blowing gently in a cool breeze whilst I’m sat next to them slowly melting into the footwell. Driving along with the windows open doesn’t help either because the air outside is hotter than in the car.
The reason for this unreadiness every year, and the reason we complain so much, is because of how quickly it gets hot. In the space of a day the weather goes from needing to wear a coat out to getting stuck because my shoes have melted into the pavement, and walking out of the front door is like opening the door on an oven. So when the heat does show up, we simply are not acclimatised. And what’s worse is, as soon as we finally get used to the heat, it disappears again, leaving us grabbing our coats once again. Take this week's forecast. It’s late May, and this week we’ve got 32-degree heat, which will be more like 40 in direct sunshine, and with the humidity added in and the added heat island effect from buildings and roads, it’ll feel like four thousand Kelvin. But by next Wednesday the temperature will drop to highs of 14 and lows of 7 degrees centigrade.
The other trouble is the heat here is different as well; in the Mediterranean, you can sit out sipping a coffee whilst taking in the sights, perfectly comfortable in 30+ heat, because it's, as they say, “a different type of heat”. Meanwhile, here, 28 degrees in a town centre is like sitting inside a sauna, only with more humidity. You cannot escape the heat either. It’s gotten to the point that heatwaves are the only time I’ll happily go shopping because it’s the only way to get out of the heat and into an air-conditioned building.
The problem is that whilst our heatwaves are short-lived, they really highlight the issues our current infrastructure has. Our homes aren’t designed for hot weather. They’re designed to keep in the heat during our long winters and shelter us from the ever-increasing amount of rain we’re getting. But the flip side of this is when the mercury starts to rise, our homes spend the day heating up, so when the sun does finally give us a break and the outside air temperature drops, our homes hang onto all the sweat-inducing heat, turning any attempts to get a decent night's sleep into a night of sweat-soaked sheets whilst a plastic fan moves the warm air around the room. It’s like trying to sleep in a fan oven. The problem, as I mentioned, is our homes were built to hold onto heat. Which means there’s no air conditioning unless you put one in yourselves. I know that in reality it’s only a few weeks in the year where we really feel the heat, but as time goes on, the heat we do get is increasingly intense. Maybe it's time to fitting homes with air-con units so when the weather decides it's time to melt the tarmac, It’ll be just a bit more tolerable.