HEATWAVE!

My memory of summers as a child is of my mother sunbathing religiously and my sister and I playing in the paddling pool.  There was one summer when I read 4 books in one day and got told off for not going outside more but generally summers seemed to last forever and to be sunny day after day.

In my 20s and 30s, living in London, I loved the hot summer weather despite the sweltering tube lines and pollution if you were cycling or walking around.  Life happened down by the river after work where people stood outside wine bars in the warm weather until it grew dark; the South Bank was a magical place of music and entertainment, close enough to Waterloo or Charing Cross station to stagger to get a train home once it grew cooler.  Frequently I got sunburnt: lazing around at friends' houses or out cycling, careless about suntan lotion and keen to go brown.  I only ever burnt once a year (even that seems too much now) and would then just turn brown.

Working in France in 1994 I would be out cycling or walking on the hottest of days, loving the heat.  I remember getting out of the car at the supermarket in Perpignan to be hit by a blast of hot air like walking into an oven: I think it was about 40 degrees that day and the temperature was regularly in the mid-30s.  Down by the coast there was a sea breeze to cool things; up in the mountains the mountain breezes; but they didn't stop the colleague I was working with and me developing tans which made us look like locals.

And then I got pregnant with Oldest Son in 2003 and the UK had one of the hottest summers on record.  Husband and I were in Sherborne when I was about 4 months pregnant the day that the temperature hit 40 degrees C at Heathrow: I was glad I wasn't more heavily pregnant.  I felt uncomfortably warm and heavy.  Sadly, in a way, I've never enjoyed hot weather so much since and so when my Mother in Law wondered if, as a Southerner, I'd find Cumbria a bit cold, I thought it unlikely.  In the May half term last year (2010) we spent a hot day in Keswick: even at 2 months pregnant I found it uncomfortable and just wanted to sit down in the shade somewhere (I wonder if I wrote about that in this blog?).  So the past two days of this year's May half term, when the temperature has risen to about 27 degrees, I have understood the baby's discomfort.  Both nights he couldn't settle to sleep until about 9p.m., which is most unlike him: today, when the temperature has dropped significantly, he was asleep at just gone 7.30p.m.  I'm happy to see the sun but I have to admit that the slightly lower temperature is more to my taste nowadays.  I find it difficult to believe that I went running when on holiday in Greece one year: although I never went very far. 

Maybe my favourite weather, at least in terms of activity, is in fact when there is a thick layer of fresh snow on the ground, blue skies and the sun is out: you can wrap up warmly to suit whatever you're doing, and going running means putting on plenty of layers in the hope that you may be able to take some off rather than feeling too hot before you even start.

However, I like all weathers in Cumbria.  Living in the country I am far more conscious of the changes in the seasons, even within the seasons, than I ever was when I lived in the city.  Life seems to spring from all corners and in a crazy way I'm not surprised I got pregnant when I didn't expect to.  I just wish there was some way of making the weeds less fertile!