They Said 1976 Was the Hottest Summer for 350 Years. So What Did We Do? We Went Out to Play
I’ve written a short piece for today’s Mail on Sunday about how much I enjoyed the summer of ’76. Luckily, there were no climate change alarmists and public health panjandrums around back then to tell us to stay indoors, unlike during the current heatwave.
For me, the extraordinary summer of ’76 holds some of my happiest childhood memories. I was a healthy 13-year-old boy living in North London who spent as much time as I could playing outside with my friends.
According to experts at the time, it was the hottest summer in the British Isles for 350 years.
It certainly wasn’t an excuse to cancel sports day and stay inside. Rather, the unrelenting good weather was just a stroke of good fortune and we were determined to make the best of it.
I kept a diary back then and flicking through its pages brings it all flooding back. Far from avoiding danger, my friends and I sought it out wherever we could.
‘In the morning I phoned up Edward to see if he could come skateboarding because he’s just bought one from Hamleys,’ I wrote on June 19. ‘We play a game called Death Race 2000 where you have to push each other off.’
One time that summer I went boarding barefoot and cut my big toe so badly I needed stitches. Luckily, we were able to get a face-to-face meeting with our local GP straight away and he stitched up the toe on the spot. Those were the days.
Worth reading in full.
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I was 14. We had the run of the local university tennis courts, and day after day we’d get there for about 10am, play all day long and go home for tea about 6pm. We’d each take a bottle of water to drink, but other than that we’d just play set after set between about half a dozen of us. No thought to sunstroke or dehydration. No mobile phones, no parents watching over us. We were just having a great time.
I feel really sad for all the kids who have never been able to just wave bye to Mum, disappear for the day, get up to a bit of mischief, maybe experience a bit of danger, then go home again. We’ve lost so much.
Worrying to read on the BBC that children are being warned about going out in the sun. And if they do go in the sun they will probably have sun cream. We can’t have natural immunity from vitamin D hitting profits now can we?
I haven’t used sun cream for many years (if ever). Funnily enough I’m healthy. Little profit though in sunshine and apricot kernels is there?
Yes, similar experiences here. My mum used to encourage me out of the house at about 9.30 and tell me to be back at 5pm for tea. She just knew which friend/s I’d be with but had no way of contacting us. We didn’t even have a house phone since it was the best way my father (a Met policeman) could avoid having to do unplanned overtime!
This touches on the single most important question that society faces – who owns an individual’s responsibility? Is it the individual or is it everyone else? The left and the elites now think – more correctly, want us to believe – that I am responsible for you, you are responsible for me. Once you’ve bought into that belief any policy, any social change, any malevolent thought or plan can be implemented with virtually no pushback. Peanuts on a plane.
Too much government. Every other problem, the precautionary principle etc. stems from this.
One of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party has identified that.
Kemi Badenoch.
Consequently, a conviction politician? no question but that she should be the next Prime Minister.
Otherwise it will be Beer Starmer in a trice….
People seem to forget that the summer of ’75 was pretty good as well. ’77 was dreadful, but it was a jubilee year, so perhaps to be expected. I remember eating every meal outside in the garden in summer 1976, including breakfast. The biggest worry was water shortages, ‘bath with a friend’….I did, regularly!
I remember in ’76, when it finally rained, my mother went and stood in the garden to get a good soaking. Bless her 🙂
I was 16 and it was probably the best summer of my life.
School sports days cancelled because sunny weather is forecast; what’s wrong with this country?
We have grown so used to seeing bizarre and irrational behaviour on the part of teachers, doctors and other professionals, that nothing really surprises us any more here in Britain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5tcAJKWGfw
History Debunked
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1976……skorchio……
Wasn’t that when ‘The Science’ was telling us we were heading for a new ice age………
I can vaguely remember what it was like in 1976. A different world, media wise, then. Well before the invention of the world wide web, only three channels on the telly, only a year or two since independent radio started up. Not even 24/7 bollocks being broadcast. Coin operated telephone boxes. No mobile phones, and so on.
On the plus side, if you lived in the SE you could get a Red Bus Rover for 50p and spend the day taking various buses up to central London, and having a very good time once you’d got there, before taking a different route home.
Of course, we could all read a map and a bus timetable then 🙂
And on cue…..https://www.gbnews.uk/news/brits-urged-to-ration-water-as-heatwave-continues-every-drop-is-precious/335714 What a surprise.
Along with absolutely ZERO food policy we also have absolutely NO policy on national water provision. Many reservoirs have been taken out of use these last fifty years. I am not convinced this is necessarily down to deliberate hidden policy, although it might have been, or plain stupidity. What we can say with total certainty is that if water rationing ever appears then there has been a deliberate failure somewhere.
I was a teenager and a red-haired, fair-skinned Brit with Scottish/Irish heritage. I did keep out of the sun as much as possible; but spent a lot of time with friends in the woods and common-land which surrounded my village.
Both ’76 and ’75 were glorious summers …. and stopped the early manifestation of climate alarmists who only a year or two previously had been warning us we were headed for a new Ice Age!
I had a “free-range” childhood …. the typical “there’s the front door and make sure you’re home for tea at 5pm …… and I tried to give my sons (born in ’89 and ’91) a similar experience. Fortunately I lived in an area of Surrey where that was perfectly possible.
I feel sorry for today’s young people who are over-protected (ie controlled) from babyhood by the Nanny State and anxious parents who are stressed-out by modern lifestyles. It’s no wonder they don’t appear to have much individuality, independence of thought and even less resilience.
Tonight’s ITV news was an unalloyed panic fest about “dangerous” levels of heat. Normal weather as Chris Morrison has pointed out, is now being routinely presented as climate catastrophe. No one gets to enjoy being scorching, we must be anxious and/or terrified. I too was a kid in the 70s heatwave in Scotland! What a lovely change people said at the time. Unfortunately the news influencers find nervous wrecks usually (wearing masks FFS) to say they are worried. When lightweight weather man Bsfir was asked if this was unique he said something like “people are certainly feeling that”. Bye bye enlightenment.😬😬
I was 18 and vividly remember a) crisp, scorched grass and b) the sun bringing me out in a cold sore the size of Wales – people would stare at it in fascination and in those good old days, NHS staff like me could ask to see a Consultant at the end of one of their clinics.
I can scarcely believe I had a frontline job in the NHS at that age but hey-ho. Consultant prescribed me a topical antibiotic and life carried on.
No moral or climate panics but we did look anxiously for rain.