When does 21° C feel cold?

I'll tell you when 21 degrees Celsius feels cold: when you've just had five days of 33 degrees Celsius.

In the past, summer temperatures used to be in the low 20s and an extraordinarily high temperature was 26 degrees C. Now, for the last 19 years, we've been having heatwaves in Continental Europe that really are no fun.

In the first heatwave of 2003, 70,000 people died across Europe - 5,000 in Paris alone. The elderly just didn't know how to cope with the heat, drank too like and keeled over. Dead.

Thus, when I went to the outdoor pool last Friday, I shivered sitting on the grass in my swimming costume and beach blouse because the temperature was only 21 and later 22 degrees Celsius. What a shame.

Sitting on the balcony at 7 this morning, I was so cold that I had to go in. Sixteen degrees C now feels like freezing point whereas it would have been a heatwave in Denmark. (I used to have a Danish boyfriend. He found 16 degrees C so hot that he started shedding clothes.)

God knows how we're going to cope with winter - especially with rising gas and electricity prices. These high temperatures of over 30 degrees C are really messing with our inner thermostats.