Smash hit

What I especially like about the heat is the anthropological opportunities it affords. The Brits aren’t built for lolling about in the sunshine — they’re built for striding across sodden marshes with the rain lashing at their whey-coloured faces. So what happens the moment it gets even vaguely hot is that everyone starts living in a fantasy, called If We Were European, where Accrington Stanley is really Ibiza and Bolton, if you squint, is Barcelona.

Everyone becomes slightly unhinged but in quite a nice way. In our heads we’re all lazy and golden and have tousled, beach hair like Sienna Miller’s. In reality, people look like angry red pigs and their hair is sticking to their heads in sweaty tendrils.

In Sunshine Land we think our limbs are bronzed and toned; in reality we’re merely parading our ham-like upper arms. We sit around at pavement cafes late into the night, as though London were Rome, and are surprised to find ourselves monstrously hungover and sleep-deprived in the morning — because, of course, there’s no siesta. (More’s the pity. I can’t think of a single person whose quality of life wouldn’t be dramatically improved by siestas. And — did I say? — more swimming pools.)

I’ve had three separate conversations this past week with people — all weather-inspired — who have said that they would quite like to “go freelance”; that is, lie in the garden all day perfecting their tan and sipping Pimm’s.

It’s temporary insanity, brought on by sunshine, but it’s very telling, because it shows that a vast number of people are hippies at heart: they just want to mooch about getting a tan, smiling at strangers and drinking rosé in the shade. (This explains California.) Your bank manager probably wouldn’t say no to living in a tepee or a yurt, if it was by a stream.

Heat means that the whole country feels as if it’s on holiday. I bet the crime figures have dropped in the past 10 days, despite all the open windows.

Obviously, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, it will probably be pouring with rain by the time you read this. Instead of frolicking on the beach, I’ll be huddled brokenly in my rented cottage, making stew and building a fire, wearing two jumpers to stave off the icy cold (at the time of writing that is not a wholly unappealing idea). Then it might carry on raining and in a fortnight's time we’ll smile sourly and say: “That was summer.”

It is/was more than summer, though: what it boils down to is that the heat we saw last week gives us a collective opportunity to imagine we’re Not Here.

It makes us be Elsewhere, far away from crumbling governments and job insecurities and problematic mortgages — somewhere where the weather is hot and the people are cool and all you really have to worry about is securing a pavement table. The heat creates the most lovely illusions.

+ Researchers from the Karolinska Institue, Stockholm, have found that being married or living with a companion halves the risk of getting Alzheimer’s and that getting divorced or becoming widowed in middle age triples it. An American study last year also found a link between dementia and loneliness.

My father, God rest him, suffered appallingly from Alzheimer’s, which was predictably traumatic and nightmarish for everyone concerned. Aside from being out every night and surrounding himself with people by day, he was the most priapic man I’ve ever met, practically a satyromaniac. He married three times and was never without a slew of girlfriends.

A nice way of putting it would be to say that he had a gift for intimacy; a blunter way would be to say that he felt ill if he didn’t have sex. I don’t think he spent a single day without, um, company — until the dementia got so bad that he had to go to a home.

Perhaps these researchers have a more pipe-and-slippers view of marriage than he ever did, but if they are coyly alluding to the frequency of intercourse as opposed to the companionable watching of the Antiques Roadshow, then all I can say is, it ain’t necessarily so.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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