Well I won't say any more about airc*n in this thread (I've promised...). However, I do wish to disabuse Maggie about how and where I've spent my life, naturally with reference to the vicissitudes of having to endure heat. Yep, I've lived in a house with thick stone walls for 35 years. But I've lived for twice as long as that. I lived for several years high up in a concrete block of flats in east London, two of those years including two of the hottest summers ever recorded in this country (1975 and 1976). From 1978 to 1986 I lived in a tight-packed brick terraced house just outside London on the Central Line, which included the two very hot summers of 1983 and 1984. In recent years we've holidayed a number of times in Andalucía, always in the height of summer (owing to my sister's school holidays), routinely in temperatures hovering around 40C. But those temperatures were tempered, as in Texas, by very low humidity. We found that 37 or 40 in Córdoba and Granada, with humidity in single numbers, was far more tolerable than 28 or 29 in Cornwall with humidity at a typical 60%. We were unlucky enough to holiday in Italy during heatwaves twice, the second one (Lake Como) with temperatures in the high thirties and sky-high humidity. I've been to Oz too, but I'll say no more about the fairly widespread complacent attitudes I found there to global warming.

So I do leave my stone-walled house occasionally, Maggie, and I've been around a fair bit during my time there as well as during the half of my life before I moved into it. Assumptions are easy. Facts are slightly more sacred!