Green and Pleasant Land?

The weather has broken - temporarily at least - and we are back to business as usual in the good old English summer. 18C, wind that hums across the chimneytops and occasional deluges of fat, cold drops of rain (known to BBC weatherpeople as short sharp showers - three cheers for institutional alliteration).

And that, more than anything else, has prompted me to ask what just happened? Now, I am inexperienced in English high summers, as I have always spent July and August primarily in Scotland (where if we get above 20C there is national rejoicing). But even the newspapers agree (Cor, wot a scorcher) that the last month has been pretty impressive. Week after week of heat, with the occasional thunderstorm wandering through just to up the humidity level. We are a country generally lacking in air conditioning - my workplace has it but by no means all do, and a few weekends ago I got a headache just from standing in Forbidden Planet for 20 minutes, reading comics (I'm a martyr to the cause). Even walking from my car to the office, at 8am in the morning, it was too hot to be outside in a t-shirt and trousers. Nobody has been sleeping well - every single dream I woke up remembering last week involved thunderstorms. (They also included my mother, Faith, Batman and the Israeli prime minister, but never mind that.)

The internet agrees - I'm not sure it's official yet, pending data collation or whatever, but almost everyone seems to be agreeing that that was the hottest July in England since records began (1659). (It may well have been the hottest month since records began in Scotland.)

The photo at the top was taken last Saturday. Remember my rainy walks out from Markeaton Park earlier this year, with the double hedgerow dripping with rain or snow? Well, this is the field on one side of that hedge as it stands at the moment. Harvest has come early this year, with forecasts of grain shortages, and green is not the colour of the English countryside, not even here oop North. More worryingly, not only is the grass everywhere withered and yellow, but a goodly selection of the trees are too. Trees line the verges of the dual-carriageway along which I travel my 15 miles to work each day, and I would say the leaves of a quarter of them (verging on a half in the worst areas) are withering or already brown and dead.

Now, I know an average temperature of 19.8C won't seem like much to some of you. Even a high of 36.5C probably doesn't. But we don't have the lifestyle or the wildlife to deal with it - English reaction to the midday sun is to go out in it, remember? And so the countryside has sweltered and people have even been observed seeking shade outdoors.

And does anyone else remember how, back in March, the winter felt neverending? Yet now I welcome the windy greyness and cold, heavy rain as long-lost friends. Amazing.