HOT AND BOTHERED

We’ve got through Halloween and bonfire night and it’s still too warm for a heavy coat. Helen Coffey asks the experts why the weather’s been so mild and if it will ever get cold again

Remember, remember the fifth of November – but feel free to forget your coat. And your hat. And your gloves. (And, perhaps, the US election result.) Temperatures have remained a balmy 14 degrees across many parts of the UK this week.

And, while Brits often love to celebrate anything even vaguely resembling warm weather, at this time of year it doesn’t feel quite... right, somehow. We’re past the start of term, we’ve come through spooky season and out the other side, we’ve even crossed bonfire night off the list. Now, we’re staring straight down the barrel of the inexorable slide towards Christmas.

’Tis the season of smugly wholesome-looking women on Instagram celebrating the “cosy core” aesthetic: chunky knitwear and wool tights; artisanal blankets; homemade root vegetable stews with toasted pumpkin seeds; gargantuanbeyond-all-sense mugs of syrupy hot drinks crowned with cream. It should be a time of crisp leaves underfoot and crisp air all around; for seeing your breath turn to mist and whipping a jaunty scarf around your neck.

But it’s very hard to embrace the genuinely enticing bits of autumn when you arrive everywhere, as I currently do, red-faced and covered in a patina of sweat, fringe plastered unattractively to forehead.

It may not be a popular opinion, but I think I speak for all perpetually overheating cool-weather stans when I say: that’s enough now, thank you. The mercury needs to drop so that the balance of the universe is restored (and I can start wearing cableknit sweaters again).