Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Tin hats on, curtains drawn, stay hydrated, or YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
If you must go out, wear ‘appropriate clothing’. A burka and a sombrero should do the trick. But avoid the hours between 11am and 3pm.
We’re talking Mad Dogs and Englishmen here.
As soon as I read on Friday that this was going to be the hottest May bank holiday since 1944, I thought to myself: That’s the column sorted out, then, Rich.
You just knew that the air-raid sirens were going off everywhere from the Met Office to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). They live for days like this.
Predictably, the warnings came thick and fast, increasingly alarmist as the temperature rose above 90 degrees in old money.
El Nino’s coming, El Nino’s coming! Don’t panic!
El Nino? They make him sound like the leader of a Mexican drugs cartel, only more deadly.
Turns out El Nino is a weather system in the Pacific Ocean, responsible for warmer waters than usual. He’s got a sister called El Nina, who does the opposite, but you don’t hear much about her because she doesn’t contribute to global warming.
Visitors flock to the beach in Bournemouth today on the hottest May bank holiday
While El Nino is being blamed for day trippers getting sunburned on Brighton beach, he’s also the reason why the weathermen are predicting a quieter than usual hurricane season in the Atlantic. Which has to be a good thing, surely?
Still, the climate alarmists aren’t going to let the facts get in the way of a good scare story. So here in Britain, the propaganda machine went into overdrive, again, even though it’ll be raining by the end of the week.
The UKHSA, the phoenix from the flames of the abolished and utterly discredited Public Health England quango, issued an ‘amber’ alert. Stay indoors, close the windows, draw the curtains, stop your kids playing in the garden.
If you must go out, wear a hat and sunglasses, and in the words of the 1999 Baz Luhrmann hit, Wear Sunscreen.
How old do they think we are – five? These are the same people who not so long ago were telling us to line our windows with tinfoil.
Dopey TV weather girls instruct us to stay hydrated. Transport chiefs tell us to carry a bottle of water at all times. It’s the same old story every time it gets a bit warmer than usual for the time of year.
We have to put up with over-excited television news reporters announcing that ‘record’ temperatures have been set at Heathrow. So what? Who goes sunbathing on Runway Two?
All this is manna from Heaven for the climate alarmists. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that the last time it was this hot in May was in 1944, before global warming was invented.
Don’t they know there was a war on? Nobody was worrying about sea levels or getting skin cancer back then.
That probably explains why my old mum used to peg herself out like Gulliver every summer, armed only with a tin of Nivea and a jug of Pimm’s No 1. And she lived to be 93.
A reminder for passengers to carry water with them while travelling is displayed at London Liverpool Street Station
Students go for a dip in the fountain in London's Trafalgar Square during the heatwave of 1976
But that generation was made of sterner stuff. So, I’d like to think, is my generation. People try to put us down, but some of us are old enough to remember the summer of 1976, when the heatwave lasted two whole months, reservoirs and rivers dried up and there were standpipes in the streets.
This was Third World weather - 96 degrees in the shade. Real hot, in the shade.
Newspapers ran ‘Phew, what a scorcher!’ headlines and fried eggs on the pavement. Nobody issued an ‘amber’ alert. We just got on with it.
Today, there’s an entire industry trying to scare us half to death and convince us that what we used to call ‘hot weather’ is caused by man-made global warming.
The good news is that nobody’s taking any notice. Millions of us flocked to the beach, parks and swimming pools ‘in defiance of official warnings’, as some ridiculous headlines put it.
Last week, the Climate Change Committee – whatever that is – declared that the Government should set maximum work temperatures – suggesting 27C (80F) for ‘sedentary’ work and 25C (77F) for ‘light physical’ work.
They needn’t have bothered. Nobody’s going to work much these days anyway. They’re all still ‘Working From Home’, especially on hot days like this. Either that, or they’ll be ringing in sick before heading for the pool or the pub garden.
Make the most of the darling buds of May while you can. This isn’t 1944 all over again, though it’s worth noting that just over a week later D-Day was postponed because of bad weather. It’s not even 1976, when Labour MP Denis Howell, a former football referee, was appointed Minister for Drought.
His solution was to import a Navajo medicine man to perform a rain dance. It worked spectacularly. The heavens soon opened and within a few days Howell was reassigned as Minister for Flooding.
This time around, the ‘experts’ are predicting a long, hot, Super El Nino summer, but my best guess is that come Wimbledon and the first Test match it’ll be freezing and chucking it down.
No doubt by then the UKHSA and the Met Office will be warning us to stay dry and not leave the house without an umbrella.
And they’ll be blaming that on ‘climate change’ and El Nino, too. Don’t panic!