If a meteorological event takes place within the bounds of a defined season, it must therefore be seasonable. And if I hear another weatherman describe the heat, or the cold, or the rain, as unseasonable I am going to emigrate to an equatorial latitude so that I never experience weather again.

Joan thinks I should calm down and eat some ice cream. She says it's the heat.

It is not the heat. It is the punishing inaccuracy of televisual speech patterns. I can feel my mind crumbling against the tide of lazy qualifications and meaningless platitudes. And the weatherpeople are the worst offenders.

In Italy the army does the weather. You can be lounging in your Roman hotel room, wondering if today it will be the Colosseo or the Pantheon, allowing the musical tones of their endless brightly-lit talk shows to wash over you, when suddenly there is a change in timbre and you look up and there is a moustachioed man in full military regalia, scowling.

You sit up and wonder of your guidebook covers what to do in the event of a coup.

He begins shouting at the screen, furious, and a map appears and your holiday dissipates before your eyes and instead you think about borders (Italy has several but not with countries who will necessarily welcome refugees) and whether, if it came to it, you would have the guts to aid the Resistance.

Your companion emerges from her shower and stands calmly as the general's medals rattle with the force of his invective. Nothing fazes her. You will now be trapped in Rome at war, as supplies dwindle and Europe collapses around the Eternal City, and eventually, if the apocalypse lessens, you will be obliged to have children and found a new colony. And in a thousand years it will be known simply as Holme...

Or Watsonia, she says. Didn't you know the military run the weather office here?

It is a very effective way to get the information across. There are no niceties, as a battle-hardened soldier smacks cardboard sunbursts onto a map of the peninsula. It will be hot, dammit! Buckle up, civilians, there will be weather and you'd better not come whining to me about it or you'll wish you'd never been born. And now the news.

In other countries they allow people who would like to be celebrities to present the weather as if it is a thrilling movie. Elements of plot and jeopardy are introduced. In America they favour probabilities, as if you might judge that a sixty percent chance of rain will allow you to continue your day, whereas a seventy percent chance will bring your plans crashing to a halt. In Britain there is enforced cheer at all times, and a focus on any areas with a slim chance of a break in the clouds. And the detail! In a country less than eight hundred miles long they spend five minutes earnestly analysing the possible weather within a twenty-five mile radius. As well as the national weather, farming weather, shipping weather and of course the vital week-ahead (subject to total change and therefore completely meaningless) forecast. In Germany they are a little more pragmatic. A map the size of the presenter's head appears in a corner of the screen, representing all of Germany, and then a single symbol – say, a sun – materialises. That's it. Local variations – sort yourselves out.

Joan says that ice cream really does help because it lowers your core body temperature. She adds, with what she imagines is her best threatening glare, that heat stroke is not a joke.

No indeed. Heat stroke is news, more news, news to fill the endless need for news which is the result of our twenty four seven media culture... and all the news needs words, and there are not enough original words to go round and anyway who can be bothered so they trot out the same old claptrap day after day -

Joan says that a wall of TVs generates even more heat and that she has plain vanilla ice cream and a spoon right here, right now.

More glaring. I quite like the glaring, it is reassuring.

We eat ice cream, draped on the couch, and then just as I think it might actually be cooling my brain, she spoils it all by commenting that boy, is it hot.