Thank God for the Guardian website. Without it I would never have known that I have been marching through a killer heatwave. For the past couple of weeks I have been quite happily carrying a 15 kilo rucksack over Alpine passes, walking the GR 5 trail which leads from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean. So, too, have plenty of others. Around Mont Blanc the path was positively crowded, remarkably with Chinese hikers. It has been hot work at times, though there is a good way to counter that: with a ‘chapeau d’eau’ – fill your sunhat with water from a tumbling stream and then put it back on your head. The biggest meteorological hazard, though, was a hailstorm, which was like being pelted with golf balls for half an hour.

But no, it never occurred to me that me that I have been walking through a ‘record heatwave’, linked, of course, to the ‘climate crisis’. Record June temperatures have........

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