You might have seen reports about a heatwave in the UK. Then you might have looked at the temperatures and thought: what? What? Readings this week have been in the high 20s, and where I live are predicted to top out at 31°C on Saturday. (That’s high 70s to high 80s in old money.) Surely that’s just… lovely? Bit of sun. Bit of warmth. Get over yourselves, wimpy British people!

But no. Because various factors add up to make things pretty uncomfortable here. We don’t, as a rule, have air conditioning. It’s increasingly common in cars. Some offices and shops (mostly supermarkets) will have some kind of cooling units. Often ineffective ones, mind. Homes? Vanishingly rare. And those homes? They’re designed to keep heat in. Mostly brick-built. Heavily insulated. Smallish windows. No air flow. And speaking of air flow, there’s not much of that either right now. No breeze at all. Plus, it’s humid, due to the UK being a weirdly shaped island surrounded by sea.

There’s no time to prepare and build resilience either. If you live in a place that’s very regularly hot, you become acclimatised. The UK, though, frequently flips seasons at almost any time of year. A week and change ago, we were tempted to put the heating back on in our house. With wind chill, the ‘feels like’ factor outside was in single figures (mid 40s, in ye olde degrees). During evenings, we were wearing fleeces and wrapping up in blankets. Now I’m sitting in my office, just after 9am, with a fan blasting into my face, watching the temperature readings on our smart radiator gadgets tick ever upwards. The windows are open and that’s doing nothing. Fans are on, which is basically blowing hot air around. Even nights aren’t helping, with their lack of breeze and temperatures stubbornly only briefly bottoming out in the high teens (mid 60s). And sunrises before 5am mean if you do leave the windows and curtains open, you’re going to wake up at stupid o’ clock.

Despite all this, I personally would take heat over murk. We often have ‘summers’ in the UK that amount to six weeks of cool grey. I am solar powered. I love the sun. But the heat can be tricky to deal with. And because of the various factors outlined above, not least the fact that for many people there’s just no ‘escape’, it can feel an awful lot more uncomfortable, stifling and intense than you’d otherwise realise from the temperature numbers alone. In short, it’s hotter than you might think. So maybe think a bit before rattling off yet another “pfft – the Brits are just wimps” post when, here in the UK, we all feel like we’re melting.