On balance I think I've decided that I preferred Scottish weather to the Bostonian type. It's true that one of the Americans at St Andrews described the weather as "very interactive", in the way that people were routinely pounded with hail and rain on the way to and from lectures, but there, you didn't have to make quite such a concentrated effort to keep the weather out of your house. It's lashing down outside and you're a bit cold? Put a jumper on.



Here, the heat and humidity leading up to the summer have already been getting to me, and they're not even meant to be in their vicious phase yet - the temperature has been hovering around 80-90 Fahrenheit (temperature conversion chart included once again) - I'm sitting right in front of a room fan pointed directly at me just now, and you can't move around without sticking to things. I don't remember it being this uncomfortable in previous years, but it's possible that I just forget about it during the equally savage winter every time (I notice I originally posted that diagram in April last year).

The local weather site shows no real end in sight even with the occasional thunderstorm trying to break up the humidity, and the headline on it at the moment is the cheerfully cataclysmic "Hurricanes Versus Oil Spill!". It doesn't help the situation that Canada is on fire just now, and we're getting hazy smoke and a smell from it even here - when we went outside on the holiday Monday I thought it was just the result of a million barbecues being ignited at once.

There's always the advantage of air-conditioning (one of the few things not invented by Britain because they had no need for it), but our flat doesn't have it until it's turned on for the whole building. It feels even more disastrous when it breaks down in the middle of the summer - last year we couldn't get to sleep before I tied two Vornadoes face down to the head of the bed, looking like we were trying to build the world's most comfortable hovercraft. It's yet another reason to look forward to our move in two weeks, when we'll relocate to a place where cold air is provided no matter what the date is.