Hot Enough To Boil A Monkey's Bum!

Summertime and the living is, indeed, easy. I have a love/hate relationship with summer. In the depths of winter, when icicles are hanging off my nose, I pray for the warmth of the sun. Two days into prolonged hot spell, I'm sitting in front of an open freezer, cursing the sun. What is it with people? Being white and Anglo Saxon, I tend to treat hot weather in the same way that a vampire treats daylight-I try to avoid it! In Britain, you will often hear people complaining about the weather: It's too cold, too wet, too dry, too hot, not cold, but not hot either! It's a national pastime. I've heard people yearn for the sun and when it arrives those same people complain that it's too hot. Hot weather is different in Britain, they say. It's a nicer kind of heat in Greece. The 95° heat in Florida is much more bearable...which is nonsense. The sun doesn't do anything different, it's just that very hot weather is so much more bearable when you are walking around on holiday, sipping a chilled drink and the only thing you have to worry about is whether the Germans have taken all the sun-beds around the swimming pool! Ok, before I get inundated by amateur Meteorologists, yes, humidity plays a part as well-but not in this story!
Next week, the most important competition in the English Cricketing calender begins. It is called the Ashes and I wrote about it a few months ago. England will play Australia in 5 test matches over the next few months and I will be praying for continued hot and sunny weather. But in the meantime, I'm off to the local KBC bank with a book and a deck chair because they have the best cool air con in town!
To accompany this post, you can find a special summertime playlist on Radio Free Belgium.