The British summer has arrived, which means that it is the time for us Brits to moan about how hot it is. There are two temperatures in Britain: too hot and too cold. There is one day a year, usually in May, when it is, as Goldilocks said, just right. With the end of the football (what, they are still playing out there?) there has been a general de-St George-flagging of England. Football shirts have been put away in the drawer until the start of the Euro2010 campaign or simply burnt en masse in the village squares and high streets of the country.

I have been out and about in the capital doing pieces of promotion for the book and had some time to waste in central London yesterday, so I wandered down to Trafalgar Square to see how the tourists and the pigeons were getting on. I was not disappointed. They were there in their droves, some wearing Union Flag hats or clad in London Underground T-shirts and clutching bags full of replica London buses and snowdomes containing Big Ben in a blizzard. The recession may still be ongoing, but tourists young and old are still coming to Britain. Though they seem to be buying a few cans rather than risk our delicious ale and trying out British pubs, at least they are if the groups I saw are anything to go by. They were mostly downing cans of lager as they enjoyed dangling their feet in the pools by the fountains.

The title of this post is stolen from the wonderfully funny band Half Man Half Biscuit. It seemed apt as it describes a snippet of very British conversation about the weather. And the song is, at least partially, about London.

One of the very best things about the internet is that it caters perfectly for obsessives. Any niche that you can think of (good or bad) is catered for online. Perhaps the apotheosis of this is the fact that someone has bothered to make a Google Map of the places that the wonderfully funny Half Man Half Biscuit mention in their songs. The band’s lyrics provide an accurate and hilarious portrait of modern Britain and their song Mathematically Safe was part of my inspiration for the entry Mathematical possibilty in We’re British, Innit.

Songs draw out obscure parts of Britain, such as Chatteris, Nantwich, Wantage and Stroud. All of which leads me to believe that lyricist Nigel Blackwell is one of the funniest men alive in Britain today. Why he does not have his own TV show lord only knows.