PHEW! How a hack loves a weather story. There’s something quintessentially British about it.

A quarter of an inch of snow bringing the country to a halt, or even better, the “wrong kind of snow”; why is our summer a washout? (the zeitgeist of June); why are we being subjected to hail stones the size of hamsters? OK, woodlice, let’s not exaggerate.

In other countries - take the USA for example - the weather is so violent it’ll end up levelling towns and killing dozens, yet we here, with our temperate climate, are the ones morbidly obsessed by the subject. The weather is so much part of our national identity.

Weird.

Whatever the weather, we Brits are terminally ill-prepared, awestruck, talking about it with every stranger we come across.

So the past few, glorious weeks - something which would not have made the average southern European blink an eyelid - are amazing to us.

And, as usual, our newspapers are merely a mirror to our preoccupations.

Usk and Tredegar were 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29C) on Saturday, the Met Office said.

And newsrooms across the UK were frantically taking their own town’s temperatures and finding out the reading in Greece, the Canaries, Sicily, for the old staple headline: It’s Hotter Than...

Send those photographers off to the beach to get the babes in bikini shots, the kids making sandcastles.

Talk to those tourist businesses getting a welcome boost.

Find out how many tonnes of ice cream have been sold.

Today is St Swithin’s Day. The old adage says that if it is set fair, we get a fair next 40 days and nights, but if it rains, it’s back to the usual summer wash-out and kids in cagoules on the beach.

The legend says that as St Swithin lay on his deathbed, he asked to be buried out of doors, where he would be trodden on and rained on. I’msure that after June, we all know that feeling.

For nine years, St Swithin’s wishes were said to have been followed, but the monks of Winchester attempted to remove his remains to a splendid shrine inside the cathedral on July 15 971. There was, reportedly, a heavy rain storm either during the ceremony or on its anniversary.

Something of a wake-up call for those of us who have only sundrenched July memories from our childhoods. Our weather has been somewhat, er, changeable for centuries.

So could we really cope with a long, wonderful summer? Before you all shout me down, think about this: One tweet I saw on Saturday said: “It’s holiday hot!”

Ah, careful now. I thought I saw something behind the eyes of people at the weekend telling me it was “such a lovely day”.

The first fizzing of a kind of panic as an idea forms. The first signs that we are thinking this through to its logical conclusion.

If it stays like this for much longer, we’ll even be past moaning about the heat, won’t we?

WE WON’T HAVE ANYTHING LEFT TO TALK ABOUT.

Oh Lord, we might have to actually talk about something else, religion, politics, family, we’ll be testifying our past sins like we’re at a revival meeting just to get through the supermarket till.

I suspect that subconsciously, some of us are already praying for a change in the weather - before social meltdown.

What a scorcher!

Pay rise condemned

LITTLE surprise that Gwent MPs condemned the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) recommendations that MPs pay rise by £6,000 from 2015.

That rise would see our representatives earning around £74,000 a year, close to treble the annual UK average wage. Local MPs have variously described the proposal as “shambolic” and accused IPSA, the body set up in 2009 in response to the expenses scandal, of living “on another planet”.

Any MP who does not can expect to be punished at the polls.