30 Jun 2026
This Is Not How I Want Summers To Be
I was in a scenario recently where someone was dishing out a warning about the heatwave – Met have issued a red warning, stay at home, stay hydrated, look after yourselves yadayada. And then they followed it up with ‘but I don’t want to be a killjoy so do go out and enjoy the sunshine’.
It got me thinking about how the British have such a cultural problem when it comes to extreme heat. We are so predisposed to celebrate the sun, to throw ourselves out there the moment the big heatball appears in the sky, that it’s like we can’t quite bring ourselves to treat extreme heat with the seriousness that it deserves. At best, we continue to try and live our lives as normal, huffing and grumbling when our routines are interrupted and at worst, we treat it like the summers of thirty years ago and find ourselves baffled when we make ourselves ill. I feel like if we adjusted everything accordingly for extreme heatwaves like we do when there’s three foot of snow, we’d fare much better.
If you do try and take it seriously, you still feel the need to caveat, play it down. I’ve done it myself many times after a lifetime of being scoffed at for wanting to sit in the shade or being accused of being boring/a killjoy because I don’t particularly enjoy it when the temperatures go above 25c, even though the reason I don’t enjoy it is because it makes me feel unwell (I’m from Yorkshire for god’s sake, I think my body was only ever designed to thrive on temperatures below 20c.).
I feel the need to over explain, to emphasise that I don’t, in fact, hate summer. I LOVE summer. And what particularly pisses me off about extreme temperatures is that it gets in the way of enjoying summer. Summer should be light, windows stretched open wide, the sound of children squealing in gardens. This last week, my house has been dark and stuffy as every window and blind were closed in an effort to try and keep the house cool (still feels like an oven). Our kids can’t sleep in their bedrooms because they face south and are too hot at bedtime to justify being safe for young children. My eldest is sleeping on the living room floor, my youngest is being taken out for a walk in the buggy two hours past his bedtime and then being transferred to our bed. And still, they toss and turn and relentlessly scratch at their too-hot skin. They are spending their days inside – airconned nursery, airconned cafes if I’ve been willing to brave the walk, Granny & Grandad’s basement playroom (gloriously cool). They have cabin fever – IN JUNE – because of lack of time outside and come home manic and grumpy. These are minor inconveniences compared to a lot of people around the world I know but, I don’t want my kids to think of summers as dark homes, the outside dangerous and to be avoided. It makes me both sad and scared for them.
A red Met heat warning has only ever been issued once before. It means severe impact on infrastructure and health implications for healthy people who are not usually vulnerable to heat. It means danger to life. It’s happening because fossil fuels are heating up the planet at an alarming rate and our governments will not act accordingly (I think the British attitude contributes to this – if we don’t treat it seriously, we don’t act appropriately); scientist continue to scream at us that we are facing apocalyptic-like conditions. The fact that this could be as cool as it gets for our kids going forward fills me with a very particular kind of terror. So being told to enjoy the weather is starting to sound extremely… odd.
My husband and I are having the conversation about whether we should invest in aircon for the billionth time. It happens every summer now (and Spring if we’re honest) but the seriousness is increasing. Like most British homes, our house holds onto heat and as the heatwaves increase year by year, more and more it feels that at least half our home becomes unusable during the summer. Neither of us wants to save the money for it or contribute to the climate crisis but we have gone round the houses so many times wondering what else to do to make 35c+ summers more tolerable for our kids (aside from moving to the arctic circle). I know, believe me, that people have it so, so much worse than us but, christ, the UK needs to get a grip on this situation and fast.
It’s not all been bad (see, there I go again). In that brief moment before dinner when our north-facing garden is in shade and my kids get to run around chasing bubbles or when we’re eating breakfast outside before the sun hits the garden, or eating two ice creams a day because: sod it. Or falling asleep looking at the inky sky because it’s cooler to leave the blind up or getting that holiday feeling stepping out of the shower and standing in front of a fan. Or lying on the grass with my husband looking at the candy floss clouds late at night. I just can’t help thinking we could still have all of that ten degrees cooler and even more so. And you know what? I’d enjoy it a lot more if every summer wasn’t accompanied with an existential dread about what the future of the planet entails.
But I don’t want to be a killjoy, so get out there and enjoy the sun okay?
P.S. shout out to any other mums currently breastfeeding in this heat. I am a dehydrated husk. You deserve a third and fourth ice cream.
Hey there!
