As today is officially the hottest day ever recorded in the UK, and last night was the hottest night.
I feel justified in wingeing about the weather.

I'm a northern European, I wear t shirts the year round. I consider 15c to be pleasantly warm and 18c to be sunbathing weather and -5c is pleasantly refreshing.
I've been to Denmark in november where I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and the Danes were all in hats, scarves, gloves and sweaters.
Vikings, it turns out are a bit 'nesh'.

Well yesterday we hit 35c in the shade.
Today it'll probably hit 40c at some point.

I'm not making any point here, just complaining about the weather

It's just too bloody hot !

One thing I find hilarious.
The British built railways across India and Africa,  where these temperatures are common place.
Yet if the thermometer hits 30c in the UK, the trains start to shutdown as the rails apparently expand too much and aren't reliably stable.
Why did they not use the same rails and joints they used in the rest of the world ?

   Other than my time in the army I've lived in South Jersey my whole life.  The hottest it ever got here was 105 F or 41 C. That's actual temperature, not heat index.  That was about 28 years ago.  It was also very humid.  The heat index was up in the 120s.  It was horrible.  We had hundreds of people dropping dead in our cities.  I remember that in the middle of the night it was still 98 F or 37 C.  I hope I never see a heat wave like that again but with global warming I wouldn't be surprised if I did.

I hear you CA, and sympathize.  There seems to be really high temps in a lot of areas this year.  Where I am the temperature itself isn't unusually high, but we're in the muggy time of year so it's just so humid all the time.  I wanted to get some practice in yesterday evening so I went out and slung 100 tennis balls.  I was sweating so much that by the end it looked like I fell into a swimming pool.

well we dropped 20c going from 40 tuesday to 20 wednesday.
And now it's about 19c and wet on thursady lol

Thats the thing about the uk - no weaher system ever lasts long

    The worst part of the UK heatwave is that most people there don't have air conditioning because they usually don't need it.  At least I can hide in my air conditioning until this is over.

school holidays have now started, so we're back to a standard english summer: warm (for us) with frequent bouts of rain

These days the most consistent good weather seems to come in the spring.

We had 2-3 week earlier in the year where if it rained, it only did so overnight.

I think we had  aweek or so last year that was around 30c every day.

When I used to work at the biscuit factory, I often was between the ovens (50 metre long ovens) where the temperature rarely dropped below 40c.
And occasionally hit 50c.
It never bothered me, guess it was really low humidity. Plus most people avoided the area, so against the wall behind number 1 oven with my feet up on a kickstool (so nobody could see them if they looke dunder the oven) was my favourite place to skive

Plus I got extra breaks anyway, because I worked in the extreme heat.
Nothing official but nobody ever questioned when i took a canteen break.

Saw a recent 'inside the factory' program where they went into a modern mcvities factory.
No people. Everything was robots and automated lines.
Weird.

I quit the biscuit about 25 years ago, and they were just bringing in trial robots.
Back then, they needed 3 people to supervise them and did the work - badly - of about half an actual person.
Just amazing to see how far they've come and just how few people there are in a biscuit factory these days.