Hot enough to make Maltese cross

Carolyn Hitt escaped Britain's extreme weather and ended up 'being microwaved' in Malta. She discusesses historical meteorological precedents in the Welsh Western Mail:

Life's a beach and then you fry. Apologies to those who spent last week bog-snorkelling through the Royal Welsh car park, watching the monsoon lash the office windows or queuing for an uncontaminated bowser, but some of us were lying on Mediterranean sands. Before you feel like battering us with a damp sandbag, this wasn’t quite as idyllic as it sounds. Reader, it was boiling, blistering, scarily hot. Malta is the filling in the sea sandwich between Sicily and North Africa, so it was never going to be just pleasantly warm. But this was the kind of heat that makes you wonder if your internal organs are being microwaved..

While the dedicated tanorexics continued to grill themselves, I retreated under the umbrella with a kaftan that could have accommodated Demis Roussos and Nana Mouskouri. But even in the shade, there is no escape for the bits of you that hang off the end of the lounger. My first step on the cooling tarmac of Bristol Airport was made by feet covered in a prickly heat rash and several blisters.

Even the natives, who usually chuckle at the inability of lobster-hued Brits to cope when the mercury rises, were getting hot under the collar. It’s making the Maltese cross. One local shopkeeper was feeling distinctly sunsick: “We now get this 10 months of the year,” he sighed, mopping a glistening brow. “I only got to wear my fleece once in December.” Unlike Greece, at least Malta wasn’t literally burning. And the poor folk of Tewkesbury would no doubt swap weeks of wading through sewage water for a Mediterranean heat wave. But there comes a point when you realise that despite all the technological advancements of the 21st century, we are completely at the mercy of the elements..

But it’s worth giving divine intervention a go as the weather now seems to get in the way of simple things like, well, living. Those who think climate change is a myth point to the illuminated weather reports of 13th-century monks. A Benedictine called Matthew Paris – who lived 750 years before his political namesake – seems to prove global warming was a habit we were acquiring in the 1230s and 1240s. He described the summers of 1236 and 1241 as “unbearably hot”; 1237 saw hurricanes wild enough to knock down buildings, while high winds sank 20 ships off Portsmouth the following year. Then came the rain. Three incessant months of flooding but with surfing serfs rather than the obligatory television news reporter in waders saying, “As you can see Sophie, I’m up to my waist in water...”

But they can throw all the meteorological precedents at us they like. The scary fantasy of extreme weather thriller The Day After Tomorrow may be getting closer to today. It still feels weird to have autumn storms as the norm; spend barely any winter mornings scraping frost of the car; and endure summers that veer between last year’s flaming June and this year’s flooded July. My abiding memory of this summer will be a mini-break in Pembrokeshire in which Narbeth resembled Mumbai in the monsoon season and feeling microwaved on the Med...