[Oberon]

Originally Posted by FIREWALL

I hear they can Tan in the Fog too.

Confronted by a spell of sizzling weather, we British shift very quickly through four distinct psychological states. I call them suspicion, immersion, irritation and revulsion. Suspicion, the first phase, seems to be hard-wired into us. Our weather is generally so unsettled that we instinctively regard any burst of sunshine as a flash in the pan... When last week’s heatwave started I was amazed by the number of people still perspiring in jackets on the Tube. After the first day or two, however, the truth dawns. It becomes clear that we are in for that rarest of British phenomena: prolonged hot weather. That’s when immersion kicks in. Our famed reserve cracks, to be replaced by sun-frenzy. City parks and squares become seas of roasting flesh... But then comes irritation. How much sleep can you miss anyway? Shouldn’t you be working instead of lying in a park getting burnt? Isn’t the smog suffocating? And if it doesn’t rain soon, what’s going to happen to the garden? So finally there is revulsion. People start to hate the sun.
I refer, of course, to Britain’s scorching s ummer of 1976 — when, from June 23 to August 29, the thermometer hardly fell below 80 and was often in the nineties. The effect was astonishing. It was too hot to sleep at night and too exhausting to walk, talk or (especially) work during the day. Nerves frayed. Tempers snapped like twigs. Railway carriages were like ovens; the Tube a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. Cultural and social life ceased; people just couldn’t summon the energy. And all those national traits that we hold so dear — fair play, humour, tolerance, compromise — evaporated faster than water in the reservoirs. Our mental and spiritual equilibrium depends on our isles being wrapped in the perpetual twilight of a perpetual autumn. A stiff breeze, rain in the air, dark clouds gathering, the delicious forecast of unsettled weather for weeks to come: that is what fuels our sense of irony, moderates our moods and preserves our sanity.
- Richard Morrison, "Global Warming Is Not For Us", "The Times"