The thing arrived on the Sunday night without being invited, and by Monday morning it had made itself thoroughly at home.

I knew before I drew the curtains. There is a particular silence that comes with weather of this kind — a Levantine hush, the air holding itself still the way it does in the courtyard of a hotel in Aden at two in the afternoon — and one wakes into it with the sense of having been moved in the night to a country one has not agreed to visit. The brass thermometer on the stable wall, a handsome instrument and quite useless, had already surrendered and was showing something in the nineties. Mungo had abandoned the hall for the boot room and lay on the flagstones like a rug that had given up on its position in life. Beyond the beeches, the Fanshawes' peacocks were making the noise peacocks make, which no one has ever satisfactorily described and which sounds, at seven in the morning, like a scandalous accusation. A man who keeps peacocks within earshot of his neighbours has decidedly given up on how he will ever be remembered.

The newspapers, when they came, advised closing one's blinds and tabs in the garden, drinking plenty of water and looking after the elderly. Sound enough, I daresay, if one occupies a flat in Wandsworth with a west-facing window and nobody to help; but those of us with 'grounds and hounds' — only teasing — with a garden, a pool and a cellar in reasonable order are obliged to take the thing a good deal further. Ours is by some margin the harder office: the preparing, the provisioning, and the seeing of an entire household through an uninvited onslaught of foreign weather with its dignity more or less intact. On this occasion, however, I announced at breakfast that I intended to spend the day flat on my back beneath the cedar.

This is not idleness. The whole distinction between sloth and repose lies in the announcement, made in advance, at table, in front of witnesses: declare the intention and you are convalescing under something very like doctor's orders, whereas to be simply discovered under a tree at four o'clock is a disgrace to the county. I positioned the deckchair myself, which took some while, since nobody else in the household understands the angle, and I have long counted the placing of it as the day's work honestly done. What I had failed to allow for was that the sun moves. I woke at ten past four with one arm the colour of a boiled crayfish and Mrs Bell standing over me holding a jug of something and wearing the expression of a woman who has found what she expected to find. And where she expected it.

Monday evening was given to the wine, and here I will be firm, because the country is full of people getting it wrong. Champagne at four degrees is a mute and sullen article, all cold and no conversation. Eight is where it begins to talk. It follows that the ice bucket left to its own devices for an hour is an instrument of vandalism — in certain distant countries, I hear, it would be taken for a bathtub, and in the less advanced of them used as one — and the host who parks a bottle in it and then wanders off to admire his roses has nobody but himself to thank for the sulk that follows. The answer is to chill the glass and not the bottle: twenty minutes for the coupes in the deep freeze and the wine arrives at its proper temperature by the shortest available route with all its opinions intact.

As long as you have enough room in your deep freeze. In this kind of weather. There is no house in this county whose deep freeze chest is not big enough to take a whole calf and a leg of mutton, and ours has taken both, along with a roe deer of uncertain date and origin, and something in greaseproof paper that predates the present Archbishop. The difficulty is retrieval. A chest of that size is not a domestic appliance, it is a mausoleum. One does not open it; one excavates it, by strata, and by rights one ought to do so under licence and with a man from the Ashmolean standing by to date the finds.

Incidentally, this was where three of my shirts went. Laid in flat on the Sunday night, on the principle — which I still maintain — that a chilled shirt is worth four fans. The principle is sound. What it requires is a system of marker buoys. Somebody put the mutton in on top of them on the Monday, the venison went in over that, and I recovered all three on the Friday in a condition best described as architectural: a shirt left down there does not become cool, it acquires the drape of a gun cabinet, and cannot afterwards be persuaded into a sleeve by any means known to me. And somewhere here two of the coupes are still missing. One loses a glass in that chest the way one loses a glove in a river. Mrs Bell now keeps a chart on the lid and has said nothing whatsoever about the shirts, which is worse than if she had.

Tuesday I swam before seven, and Tuesday, therefore, was the best day of the week.

The pool at that hour is a different body of water altogether: a thin mist sitting on the surface, the whole thing still remembering the night, and a cold at the deep end that goes through one like good news. Eleven minutes is the correct dose. One emerges morally unassailable and stays that way until luncheon. By eleven it has gone to broth, and by three it is warmer than the air, which is an affront to the entire idea of a pool; the fellow who goes in at noon is telling you something about himself that he would do better to keep back. Nobody else uses it, which is precisely how I like it — though I learnt recently that on Thursday the Fanshawe children had unlocked the new paddock gate and visited it while I was in the cellar, and on Friday Colonel Fanshawe regarded my towel left on the terrace rail as a form of invitation. I think he must have been inebriated and confused my pool with his own.

At breakfast I issued, standing, a Dispensation comparable in scale only to Deauville: ties suspended, linen throughout, the expiry stated aloud as sundown on Sunday, so that standards resume of their own accord rather than having to be reimposed afterwards, which is awkward for everybody and never entirely takes. Rupert, who is fourteen and reads too much, asked whether the dispensation extended to shoes. I said that it did not. He has raised it twice since.

I then issued a second ordinance, and I regard it as much the graver of the two. I do not consent to being touched by anyone in this weather, and I shall treat any attempt upon my person as an actionable assault. Handshakes are suspended until the barometer relents. The kissing of cheeks — a foreign practice, and very probably the origin of the entire trouble — is abolished outright and will not be revived. Amelia, who has a lawyer's mind and no business having one at eleven, enquired what the damages would come to. I told her that would depend upon the humidity.

Mungo got into the pool at some point on Tuesday afternoon. I want to be clear that the filtration system was not designed with a Labrador in mind, and that this is a conversation to have with the engineer beforehand rather than, as in my case, on the Thursday, by telephone, at length, while standing in the only patch of shade the courtyard affords.

Wednesday, being the mid-point, I devoted to logistics. Any competent host stations bottles in deep shade at intervals about the grounds — one beneath the yew, one in the boathouse, one behind the potting shed under a folded sack — on the sound principle that wherever a guest finally gives out and lies down, he ought to come to rest within arm's reach of something. I drew a map. I gave a copy to Pargeter, who found the whole scheme deeply funny, and who then moved two of them, denied moving them, and continued to deny it on the Friday with an air of injured Anglican rectitude. The boathouse bottle has never been recovered. I have marked it on the map as lost at sea.

Wednesday was also the day of the correspondence, and this is the one piece of advice in the whole week that I would defend before any tribunal. Rise at five, when the air is still thin and blue and the birds are carrying on unreasonably, and deal with the entire postbag: the christening, the two refusals, the letter to the bank that has been fermenting since Whitsun. By seven, I had discharged every obligation I possessed before most of my friends had located their dressing gowns.

What no one warns you is that a day discharged by seven is fourteen hours long and completely empty. I had run out of week by luncheon and spent the afternoon reorganising the fishing flies.

The telephone was carried to me at about four by Mrs Bell, on the long lead, an operation she does not enjoy and therefore performs in total silence. I was in the deckchair by the pool, in the last of the shade, at that stage of the afternoon when a man has stopped pretending to himself that he intends to get up.

It was Verity Olive, whose people farm the far side of the village and who went up to London to study art — London, of all the places available to a girl with a perfectly good county to grow up in — and who was ringing to ask whether I should care to come in that evening and hear some jazz in Soho with a party of her friends.

I explained that it was far too hot for that. I was in Oxfordshire. I was beside the pool. I expected, within the half hour, to be in the pool, with a glass of fizz standing on the coping within reach of my hand, and I could not see what Soho proposed to add to the arrangement.

She said she thought I was terribly funny, which is what the young say when they have decided against arguing, and then asked why I did not simply get an air conditioner.

An air conditioner!

I put it to her — and at some length, I am told, the deckchair having a broadening effect upon a man — that this is the most treacherous proposition to have been laid before the English countryside since the Corn Laws. Every other measure in this account rests upon the same honourable footing: that one is uncomfortable, that one has taken the matter personally, and that one has then done something ingenious, or absurd, or both, but actionable about it. The ghastly and ungodly machine may abolish the discomfort for some... But better the devil you know, and it is my discomfort! Borne with fortitude! And fortitude, when the pool has gone to broth, and one's shirts are under the venison, is very nearly all we have left of the national character. Whatever next?! Curtains and gates that draw themselves? Lodges in Sutherland warmed to seventy degrees for the comfort of visitors from Surrey?

She was in her club by ten, I imagine, and I was in the water by twenty past four, and I submit mine as the better of the two evenings without any expectation of being believed.

Thursday I revived the punkah, the Indian Civil Service having solved this problem in about 1830, and it remains a mystery to me why we gave the answer back. A broad fan hung from the beam, worked by a cord: that is the whole apparatus. The cord requires an operator, and this is precisely what godchildren are for. I admit, the rate is no longer a shilling an hour, but with a bit of haggling, an ice cream from the village may do a trick, and one rotates them every forty minutes, because the rhythm falls to pieces after that and the resulting draught turns editorial. Amelia is a natural. Rupert lasted eleven minutes and then advanced a theory about child labour, largely accurate but unenforceable, which he had clearly been saving. The youngest pulled the beam fixing out of the beam, and the fan came down across the end of the table, taking with it a decanter I was not especially fond of and a great deal of my authority.

We dined that night in the cellar, which is where our ancestors — who were not fools — spent August. Every house built before 1840 has a cold room in it somewhere: dairy, game larder, north-facing pantry, or the cellar itself, and the temperature falls eight degrees on the stairs. Have the small table carried down, some candles lit, and dine there. Guests will assume it is a theme, congratulate you warmly on the atmosphere, and stay until midnight. The Fanshawes stayed until twenty past. Getting Colonel back up a flight of stone steps at that hour is not a task, but an operation, and it has a language and literature of its own. I record for the sake of completeness that hands were laid upon me at ten minutes to one in the morning, and that I laid hands in return. Both parties have since agreed to characterise the incident as a fall, and no proceedings will follow.

Friday the beds went out onto the lawn.

My aunt Constance did this for eleven consecutive summers and held that in July the house was an unnecessary intermediary between herself and the sky. Netting, a jug, a torch, and a bell for emergencies that never come. The dew arrives at about four, all at once, and settles for ever the question of whether one is awake; the peacocks start at five and are joined at ten past by every rook in the parish. Nobody slept. Everybody at breakfast claimed to have slept magnificently, and by Saturday night, when we did it again, that was nearly true.

Friday afternoon I walked down to the orchard and came upon Colonel Fanshawe at the gate, cleaning a rifle.

I should like to convey the full impropriety of it. Not in a gun room, at a bench, cloth laid out and the door shut, as any man of his vintage was taught to do — but leaning on somebody else's gate in plain view of the lane, the weapon across the top bar, rod going up and down, for all the world like a fellow in one of those American pictures where the sheriff perches on a fence and delivers his philosophy to a passing horse. Forty years in the army, and this is what has survived of it. I made no observation. There are moments when an observation amounts to encouragement.

He, however, was in a talking humour. He remarked that the entire country had submitted to colonial weather without a murmur, which was the first sensible thing I had heard out of him all week, and I was within an ace of agreeing with him. Then he supplied the cause. This ungodly and unbritish warmth, he said, had been brought over by the hordes of foreigners lately arriving in the country.

Pish-tosh and poppycock. I have called the weather foreign all week, and I mean by it exactly what a man means when he says the fish is off: that it does not belong here and I should be glad to see it go. But the Colonel meant something else.

Being a reserved person, I said nothing of this. I instead produced one loud, disapproving umph, which in this county carries roughly the authority of a High Court judgment. He turned back to his barrel. I went on through the orchard. Neither of us has referred to the exchange since, and by matins on Sunday we had both arranged our faces on the clear understanding that it had never occurred at all.

Saturday I gave serious thought to Sutherland. I hold Sutherland to be the correct answer to July, and I hold it with the placidity of a convert. Heat of this kind cannot follow one north of Ullapool; it lacks the paperwork. Somewhere about Inverness it is turned back at a desk by a man who has seen its sort before, and what gets through to Assynt is a thin, apologetic warmth that the natives describe as close and that requires a jersey after eight.

The journey is a good half of the cure, being long enough to constitute a change of character. One takes the sleeper as far as it is prepared to go and drives the remainder, and the final forty miles are single track with passing places, upon which one will in due course meet a Land Rover containing a man who has no intention of reversing and the whole of the afternoon in which not to do it. The recommended procedure is to switch off the engine, step out, and admire the view until he weakens. He does not weaken. No case of his weakening has ever been recorded. But the view is magnificent and one has nowhere in particular to be, and I have come to think of the encounter as the moment the cure takes hold.

The sea at Achmelvich is a temperature that would stop a horse. One goes in to the waist, at which point the nervous system convenes an emergency meeting, and one comes out some four minutes later with the complexion of a radish and the settled convictions of a Presbyterian. It is the only bathing in Britain from which a man emerges a better character than he went in.

The midges arrive at twenty to nine with a plan. I have no quarrel with them. A grievance one can name, see approaching and complain of at dinner is a restful thing; what wears a man down is the anonymous, nationwide, unanswerable warmth of an Oxfordshire July, which cannot be blamed on anybody and therefore lodges in the soul. And the lodge disposes of every other problem in this article at a stroke. The light does not stop, so there are no curtains and no call for any. The larder is colder than our chest and rather better organised. There is no question of chilling a glass, because no glass in that house has been warm within living memory. And the bath tap runs a deep peaty brown for which Colonel Fanshawe would pay money in Harrogate.

The sole difficulty is the stalker, who, invited on a day of sixty-one degrees to comment on the weather, will observe that aye, it has been warm — and mean it — and who is consequently the only man in the kingdom whose views on the subject I am willing to hear out.

The finer manoeuvre, naturally, is not to go at all: announce Sutherland loudly on the Monday, cancel nothing, and remain in the cellar for a fortnight with the wireless and a cold bird. The telephone goes unanswered because one is away, the house empties, nobody comes, and it is the best two weeks in the calendar. I got as far as the timetable, and have since written for the whole of August.

Then I went out to look at the border, where the spaniel had excavated a hole down to the cool earth and was lying in it, at full length, looking pleased with herself, at a cost of one delphinium.

And that, I think, is the whole of it. The animal had grasped the problem on the Monday morning while the rest of us were issuing dispensations and drawing maps of buried wine: find stone, or shade, or water; lie in it; say nothing. I wet a towel and put it on the flags and sat down on the step beside her, and we watched the afternoon go by together, and I was more comfortable than I had been all week.

On Sunday the dispensation expired at sundown, as advertised. The vicar, coming up the path after matins, asked me how I was finding the weather.

Here is the last thing I have to offer, and it took me seven days, a decanter, a delphinium, three ruined shirts and a filtration system to arrive at it. Since the middle of June the entire nation has talked of nothing else, comparing figures the way men compare scars, and every one of them has surrendered without noticing the moment it happened. To remark upon the temperature is to concede that it holds some authority over you. The correct answer is that it is rather pleasant, thank you, and have you seen what the greenfly have done to the Bourbons.

The weather is foreign, it is a bore, and it has no business north of Biarritz. Bores are not discussed. They are outlasted.


Percy Simon writes (only when utterly bored) on manners and misconduct for The Eccentric.