The feeling of dread is as familiar as it is unwelcome, and it announces itself in roughly the same way each year. A chatty, smiling presenter turns to a chatty, smiling weather forecaster, and with a chilling bonhomie announces that the forecaster is about to, perhaps for the first time in some time, make themselves very popular. They agree that they are about to perform their very favourite task, and as their smile widens and they turn gleefully, sadistically, demonically to the map, my stomach knots, my teeth grit and I brace for the words that will signal months of confused, lethargic sweaty misery.

 

“Well, it looks like summer is here!”

 

For as long as I can remember, hot weather has felt to me like a joke that all on the planet immediately understands and finds hilarious - except me. I know on some level that it must be a good joke, as it is frequently retold and always, universally, to laughter and joy and much cheer - but not from me. My concept of a “nice day” is simply at a 180-degree remove from that of everyone else.

 

Almost at once, the presence of sun in the sky, its light in my eyes and its heat in the air, start to tire, infuriate and depress me. My energy levels drop, my irritability levels rise, and I start desperately trying to remember what cold feels like, while manically craving the onset of autumn. Only air conditioning offers respite – a big white machine the size of a washing machine and many times as noisy sits in my bedroom for targeted relief, and should summer overwhelm that, I’ll head to my car and sit in it with the fans running until I start to revive. Hot weather also brings a phobia regularly into my life in the form of insects (even they seem to be part of the pro-sun conspiracy); not even a trip to the very excellent Insect And Butterfly World was enough to help overcome my aversion to this particular strand of summery hell. Sleep becomes impossible. Each night becomes a dilemma: either leave the windows open in the hope that temperatures may drop a little, but become jarred awake by birdsong, or close them off to the hateful chirping and burn up just that little bit faster.

 

To me, the good weather is bad enough; a torment quite sufficient should any enemy have consciously selected it to inflict upon me. Yet it brings a greater and even more frustrating problem: just how to respond when it seems that every single fellow human greets you with the expectant sense that the sunshine simply must be making you as happy as they are. How they describe the day! Stunning, beautiful, amazing; the list of adjectives they use firstly seems never ending, and secondly is populated entirely with words which describe exactly the absolute opposite to those which I’d be tripping over myself to use: miserable, hateful, unbearable. I have friends who I have known for decades – literally decades – who to this day bound up to me as they do with everyone else, and spray their buzzy sunshiney conversation all over me. But how to wipe it off: sometimes I just nod limply, exhausted as I am by the evil heat; at other times I’ll smile weakly and remind them that I’m not what they might call “the biggest fan of this weather”. They’ll reply nervously, almost apologetically, and certainly once again less than entirely sure how to deal with the sun-hating nutter in front of them. And with people I don’t know, the trick I need to pull off is even stranger. On the radio, I’m aware that everyone listening on a sunny day has joy streaming straight into their lives from the blue cloudless skies. I can usually maintain the pretence that I feel the same only until a text or a call arrives sympathising with me for “having to be inside on a day like this”. Are they mad? Actually, literally, clinically mad? I am in a windowless basement with ruthlessly effective air conditioning blowing a blissfully cold and constant stream of air at me. It’s my nuclear bunker, my refuge from the insanity raging above, my sanctuary from the inferno raging not twenty feet from my face.

 

It’s summer as I write, and already the part of the season which everyone else has complained about as being disappointing, brief and poor, has in fact struck me as hotter and longer than anything I wanted. And there is still a long way to go. I’d settle for a constant overcast 12 degrees between now and October, but that seems like too much to ask for. So all I can do is hope that autumn rolls on, and that once again the popularity of that smiling forecaster plummets like a stone. They shouldn’t feel too  bad – after all, when everyone else is against them, I’ll be cheering them on.