I'm off to the sun to cool off

I remember the summer of 1976 very well. While most of Britain turned a dusty shade of brown, my family spent two weeks on holiday in a pocket of mid-Wales where it rained every day. Torrentially.

It was also the first family holiday in which my elder brother didn’t join us (17 and too cool for school), but this meant that every evening the four of us (dad, mum, sister and me) would cagoule up and walk to the local phone box, into which we would all squeeze, while my father would call home. "What's the garden like?" would be the opening gambit. "Yellow," would come the reply. And so that went on for a fortnight. Every evening a bemused and bedraggled horse would saunter over to look at us, mockingly, as we appeared progressively more rust red while the rest of the country became increasingly less green and pleasant.

After that summer we returned to traditional British climes with July/August enjoyed in the unpredictable climate that this country had become used to. If you wanted sunshine you'd have to go on a package holiday to Spain. 42 years later, I've lost all perspective on what summer temperatures in Britain should be. The heatwave that has seemingly taken over the weather in the last two months - some parts of the UK have now gone 54 days without rainfall - shows no sign of ending. I can't remember the last time I slept solidly for the full eight hours.

We should be rejoicing. This is the kind of summer weather we all dreamed of as we dodged showers in another Cornish resort, back in the days when Cornwall wasn't the British equivalent of Santa Cruz. Heatwaves, in old money, used to be a week or, at most, two, in which the tabloids ran gratuitous front page pictures of dogs cooling off in duck ponds and young ladies in bikinis eating ice creams on Bournemouth beach, along with 'fancy that' stories of roads cracking. Now we're enduring the longest such dry spell for 49 years, and it's expected to go on for at least another week. Tomorrow could reach 35C, prompting the Met Office to issue an 'amber' heatwave alert and a "Level 3" warning - the weather equivalent of DEFCON2. If it reaches 4, officially there will be a national emergency. And, presumably, nuclear war. The irony of all this is that people are choosing to spend their summer holidays in the UK. The Times today reports that travel agents are discounting foreign holidays by as much as 40% as they try to persuade Britons, as-yet undecided about their holidays, to head for relatively more comfortable destinations around the Med.

Parched: Greenwich Park in May, and today.
Pictures: © Simon Poulter 2018 and Royal Museums Greenwich

Of course, we Brits are never satisfied with the weather, nor do we fare well with any of it. In the autumn the railways can't work due to leaves on the line; in winter, snow brings everything and everyone to a halt; spring - well, we can now skip spring and move straight on to summer, when it is hot and sunny (as prescribed), but so hot and sunny that railway tracks mangle and dustcarts sink into molten tarmac. The problem is that we're just not cut out for extremes of weather. Take the London Underground: built by the Victorians who, if they wanted to experience tropical heat would have to invade an equatorial country in the name of the Empire, its tunnels were built so deep that they cannot be adequately air conditioned. Thus, yesterday, Central Line trains reached temperatures of 36C in overfull carriages during the rush hour. EU legislation specifies that cattle should not be transported at temperatures higher than 30C. Tube trains are so hot that you may as well dress in swimwear. Regular clothing will become drenched in sweat, I guarantee you, within a couple of stops.

Such is the relentlessness of the heatwave that I can't understand why travel companies are having to give away holidays to Spain. With official NHS and Public Health England guidance being "seek shelter" as the heatwave continues and outside temperatures creep closer to the human body's own core temperature, the Mediterranean is starting to look like a very attractive place in which to cool down. There is, however, much worse elsewhere: Japan has declared a 'natural disaster' as its current heatwave sets new records, with the city of Kumagaya recording temperatures of 41.1C yesterday. At least 65 people have so far died of heatstroke with another 22,000-plus hospitalised. Even the Nordic countries are suffering - Finland is likely to get up to 29C later this week, which is, relatively speaking, extreme (though most Finns do at least have endless forests and lakes in which to find respite).

Climate change has made these extremes the new norm. Some experts say it's just a cycle, others fear that we're heading for worse. As much as I love warm weather (when I moved to California people warned me that I'd soon get bored with the sunshine - I didn't), I'm missing the predictability of the English summer. I used to like the fact that if I wanted to enjoy hot sun, a two-hour flight south would sort me out, and that I'd return to England in August, with people talking about "putting on an extra layer". Two months into this heatwave, I'm looking forward to normality. I just don't have an idea of when that will be possible.

If manners maketh the man...

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It seems hard to believe that Christmas Day was just two weeks ago and we were in the midst of celebrating goodwill to all. But today's the day everything - and everyone - properly comes down to Earth with a bump: even if you were already back at the coalface last Tuesday, slightly hungover and still smelling of that Christmas gift perfume/aftershave you promised to keep wearing beyond Boxing Day, you may have been able to enjoy a few extra days of lighter roads and emptier trains thanks to the lucky minority who extended their festive break with a note from matron and a quick trip to the the Caribbean.

By lunchtime today, normal pre-Christmas blood pressure levels will have returned, as office routines are reapplied in full. You-know-who is once again forgetting to restock the printer paper, the annoying one has resumed her/his loud personal phone conversations in an already aggrieved open-plan office, and because it's winter, there will be the lunchtime odour of particularly pungent soup wafting across the desk opposite.

Assuming you were actually able to get to work, thanks to the rail strike, you will have already have experienced the kind of bad manners you'd blissfully forgotten about during the break. If you commute by train, you'll have endured standing room-only in a packed, sweaty carriage, the sounds of someone's iPhone playing Game Of Thrones without headphones or relentless sniffing as you realise that you're crammed into an eight-carriage Petri dish swimming with the latest winter ills. As you disembark, you'll have been bundled out the door by the twat with the folded Brompton bike, desperate to get on the road where, with his fellow legion of fluorescent Lycra-clad cycling orcs, he will make life misery for all other road users by regarding the cycle lane as merely a suggested thoroughfare while preferring the open road.

This might be a bit much to lay on the morning head, especially so soon in the week, and indeed so soon in the year. But the return to normal hostilities today is a reminder of just how bad mannered we've become. One of the things I smugly enjoyed whilst living abroad was Britain's supposed reputation for good manners. According to some, we doffed our hats to motorists as they invited us across pedestrian crossings, and we obsessively said sorry for everything, especially to the Tube station tripper when being tripped, despite being the tripee. Indeed, we Brits xenophobically use good manners to distinguish ourselves from sunbed-hogging, queue-jumping, a-please-wouldn’t-go-amiss Johnny Foreigner.

At risk of turning this into a Daily Express why-oh-why piece, there is no doubt that Britain, in the time I was living away from it, lost its civility. And no more so than in London. We charge down Underground escalators at five in the afternoon as if the last train of the day is about to leave, oblivious to the passengers left wobbling in our wake like teetering skittles. We bomb about glued to our smartphone screens, seemingly unaware of the proximity of any other warm body, apparently unable to detach ourselves from e-mail and social media to perform the simple task of walking down a busy street. And while it should be praised that Londoners are taking exercise, the proliferation of aggressive cyclists and joggers charging through pedestrians with arrogant superiority has led to a complete disregard for anything or anyone other than their own adrenaline-pumped, endorphin-rushed selves. Off the streets of London things aren’t much nicer: assuming you can get to a Tube station without being stabbed or have face-melting drain cleaner thrown at you, there are the overcrowded trains where people block doorways and don’t want to reduce the sweltering, sweaty inhumanity by opening a window for fear of upsetting the one passenger likely to complain they're cold.

I’m not alone in seeing this London. Late last year the influential Centre For London think tank published a report identifying the disappearance of civility in the capital and calling for a code to restore politeness and good citizenship. In particular it identified Londoners' main complaints, from pedestrians wandering aimlessly while looking at phones to the aforementioned cyclist scourge, and from lorries choking streets to passengers refusing to give up their Tube seats to those more in need. CFL has discussed its findings with Transport for London chiefs in the hope that some of them could be turned into guidelines that could eventually be incorporated into a rewritten Highway Code.

"Increasingly we live and walk and move in a bubble," said Patricia Brown, who helped commission the report, telling the Evening Standard: "We all need to realise that we’re part of a system and have to apply some sort of process to the way we move. Ultimately we don’t have enough space in the city for all of these different things to work in a perfect way. Some people are alert and very polite as they move around. But we get very frustrated with the increasing number of people that are in the bubble."

That frustration manifests itself with road rage (such as the motorist, Shanique Syrena, who screamed insults at BBC presenter Jeremy Vine as he cycled home, leading to a threat of knocking him out, a confrontation that led to her being found guilty of threatening and abusive behaviour and sentenced to nine months in prison). Underground, however, things are getting even worse, as platforms swell to dangerous levels of overcrowding during peak hours.

Last year there was a "dramatic" surge of public order incidents on the Tube with, in particular, "low-level violence", pushing and shoving, arguments and passive-aggressive behaviour becoming threatening, in the morning and evening peak commuting times, as well as on Friday and Saturday nights. Transport For London figures found that all forms of transport, with the exception of the bus network, "experienced an increase in the volume of reported crime and a higher rate of crime per million passenger journeys compared with the previous year." Now, while many of these incidents were criminal, rather than anti-social behaviour, the underlying trend of the latter were catnip to the rail unions spoiling for a fight over reduced staffing at stations.

Inevitably, all this negative energy does us no good. For those who commute by car, the absence of manners isn't any better, and according to a study published before Christmas, more than half a million people in the UK are seeing their work suffer due to the stress of driving to work. "Stress is bad for us in the morning because the cascading of stress hormones released can leave us feeling frazzled, reactive, anxious, low in mood and energetically depleted before the demands of the work day has even begun," Suzy Reading, a psychologist, specialising in wellbeing and stress management told the i newspaper. Commuting in London, in particularly, is stressful enough without that stress being exacerbated by stressed-out commuters being obnoxious and inconsiderate.

There are ways to mitigate the rude fellow commuter: Kerry Alison Wekelo, of the US consulting firm Actualize Consulting and author of the book Culture Infusion, recently told the New York Post that we should simply roll with the punches on difficult journeys to work: "Simply laugh out loud, or strike up a conversation with a stranger and say something like, ‘You could not make this up if you tried'," she suggests, along with, simply, breathing deeply to relieve anxiety and stress. And if that doesn't work...there's always the bigger picture: "If you cannot find balance, look for another job that will not require as long a commute," she told the Post. "If you are working or commuting too much, then you will not have the energy to be at your highest performance at work or home." It sounds simple, but with the recent hikes in rail ticket prices (in addition to the lousy services of some rail companies), you couldn't blame anyone for opting for a daily routine with civility built in.