The mainstream media is in full on panic mode about the weather. However it is a media panic that people should in general ignore. Yes of course I agree that hot weather can be a problem for those who are unused to it but we need to have some context here.

What we are having is a normal British summer with occasional high temperature spikes caused by warm air moving across Western Europe from the South. This is not unusual and it’s not the end of the world.

Parts of Britain such as the more rural West Midlands are only, going by the forecasts, likely to be having a few days of intense temperatures of 37 Celcius or 98.6 Fahrenheit. Temperatures will then drop a bit to more normal summer temps of 23 to 25C or 73 to 77 F. Normal summer will return on Friday when it will then piss down with rain. London is likely to be of a similar temperature generally with their rain also predicted to arrive on Friday.

Britain is getting a couple of days of intense heat before we get more usual summer temperatures. This is not like 1976 when we had very high temperatures for several weeks in July. As someone who remembers 1976 as I was an early teen then, I don’t recall there being the sort of headless chicken panic about the drought and weather as there is to day. One example of the panic is that our child’s school have offered, because of the weather, that children can stay off school today and not have it recorded as an unauthorised absence. There’s no need for this. It’s pandering to those who buy into every scare story and every lurid headline that’s going.

The children should be in school as these are temperatures that many countries endure for much of the year rather than just for a few days. Children have missed enough education already because of the ill advised decision to close schools due to Covid, I see no benefit in depriving kids of their education today just because the temperature is one slightly more elevated by a few degrees than is normal for a British summer. My child went to school today because we understand that this is just a small bit of freak weather, those who sit and imbibe whatever scaremongering drek is fed to them by the BBC or Sky News are probably the ones keeping their kids off of school.

Take sensible precautions in the hot sun, that’s all that is needed to be done. We don’t need the sort of unnecessary panic and scaremongering as we’ve seen from both the media and some of our public servants.