There’s just no pleasing me. For months I’ve been complaining about the grey, miserable weather. Now in the midst of sunny, hot weather I’m fed up with it already.

The sad truth is that I love the lighter days in summer but can’t stand the heat. At all. I just don’t have any energy, I’m sweaty and uncomfortable, I don’t sleep well, I’m more grumpy than usual (so extremely!) and I don’t want to eat anything (actually that one isn’t so bad both my budget and my waistline could do with slimming!)

Added to the heat we also have the city’s favourite summer tricks, pollen, pollution and commuting. The underground is a marvellous thing but not all that great when it’s packed with sweaty, smelly people. Welcome to London, please use more deodorant.

I’m fairly used to it and always travel with tissues, water and a plastic bag (the last because the migraines often cause throwing up – I’ve actually stopped being embarrassed by it and just try to do it quietly, apologising as much as I can). Others are not and people are fainting a lot. Two journeys a day, 4 delays due to passenger alarm being pulled so far this week and I was working from home yesterday! That’s a lot of fainting and because and this year there are no extra staff to pull them off the trains quickly (last year we had the Olympics and TfL got all fancy). So we wait, in the heat and people begin to feel faint and so it goes on…

That’s just general though and I can handle the commute. Harder is pollen and pollution. We had a really long winter and cold spring this year, so the usual tree pollen followed by grass pollen didn’t happen, it all hit at once. I take an anti-histamine daily during the summer and normally that’s fine. Not this year, this year I’m using my inhaler, usually just used before an outside run in the evening, every morning or I can’t breathe by the time I’ve walked to the station. Which is not good.

If the heat is making  me more irritable than usual, next door have been renovating their house for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for the last 8 weeks. There’s only so much banging and drilling and sanding a person can take, but we’ll add to that the Middle Eastern equivalent of Celine Dion, warbling her way through cheesy music, a dog that has a barking problem in that it won’t stop and a bloody rooster crowing in the distance (you already know my thoughts on chickens in cities) and I am about demented with being really, really cross.

Embracing the good weather and frolicking through fountains is probably not going to happen this week!