Weather forecasters, wipe that smile off your faces: heat is utter hell

Daniel Hambury
Melanie McDonagh16 June 2021
WEST END FINAL

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What is it about weather forecasters? When there’s a heatwave and temperatures head for 25 degrees, or 30 in the shade, they adopt the bright note of people with good news to share, dropping their voices only when they’re warning about the humidity breaking with a thunderstorm. (Apparently, that’s due to happen tonight, thank God.) What’s wrong with them? Do they not realise that they are effectively discriminating against that large, vulnerable and marginalised group, those of us who can’t stand the heat?

When I say I can’t stand the heat, I mean I can handle a nice warm day. If I’m somewhere with a garden, I like being out in it, perhaps in the dappled shade. But that’s not the condition of most Londoners. Memo to broadcasters and my fellow journalists: most of us living in London don’t have gardens. I occupy the top floor of a mansion block. In hot weather the heat rises and the only way to keep the sun out is to keep the curtains drawn. I can see the attraction of running pictures of girls with crop tops and sunglasses, but that still doesn’t make a heatwave good news.

For some of us, it’s a cue to get into the office and to wallow in the shade and the air conditioning. It gives the lie to the notion that working from home is the better option for worker productivity — au contraire.

Sad cases hang around the chiller cabinets in the supermarkets. Some of us are just not cut out for hot weather. There was a report today from the Climate Change Committee pressure group, warning about the unpreparedness of the UK for increases in temperature above the predicted 1.5 degrees by 2050 to a possible four per cent over present levels by 2080.

It seems pretty tendentious to me, but what did catch my attention was its warning that homes, especially flats, aren’t built to accommodate higher temperatures. It wants the Government to require landlords to adapt buildings with things like window shades.

This sounds good right now, without the Doomsday scenario. Modern buildings designed with expanses of glass on the exterior (seen the hideous Nine Elms development?) are not propitious for hot weather — think greenhouses. Instead we — and I mean architects and planners — need to think Mediterranean, and plunder the architectural tradition of cultures that have adapted to hot weather — internal courtyards, for instance, with shady interiors.

What’s also wildly discriminatory is the failure of sports organisers to take account of a constitutional proclivity to wilt in the heat in working conditions. If I were a sportsperson — unlikely, I know — then I’d insist in my contract that I shouldn’t be asked to play in the summer months; September to May would be fine. Instead, every tournament and championship peaks in the summer, which favours those from cultures where they’re used to hot weather, but is hellish for anyone from temperate zones. There was a reason why last night’s France-Germany game was livelier — well, a bit livelier — than the England-Croatia match on Sunday, and it is that the game was in the evening, when it was cooler, and when the players weren’t forever trying to wipe the sweat from their faces with their shirts.

The Olympics are invariably held in the summer, even in places such as Athens where no sane individual does anything except stay indoors during the heat of the day, ie anytime between 10am and 6pm. But even here, temperatures of 25 degrees and more make it difficult to run around. Let’s remove the assumption of the hotter the better when it comes to games. It’s probably only cricket, essentially a summer sport, that works well in the heat — at least they break for tea.

In some cultures there are inbuilt allowances in the working year for hot weather. In France, no one expects workers to be in hot, crowded Paris in the month of August, because everyone sensible is going to be elsewhere, mostly in the south or by the sea. That’s a civilised accommodation with the fact that a city in the heat is for the suckers with no choice to get away; everyone else is somewhere cooler.

There’s not much we can do about the weather but we can at least get our weather forecasters to bear in mind when announcing hot weather that there are lots of us out there for whom hotter weather is an occasion for gloom. Take that smile off your faces.

Are you enjoying the heatwave? Let us know in the comments below.

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