Too Close to the Sun - by Dea Birkett

It’ s late at night (isn’t that when all blogs are written?), and London is cooling down. It’s been a hot day in the city, and everyone’s been complaining about it, including me. The kids were all sweaty when they arrived back from school, in that way that kids don’t really sweat, just get damp and grumpy.

So there’s some irony that I’m also now surfing the net to find somewhere hot to go away. The Eurocamp survey (www.eurocamp.co.uk/KidsViews) I mentioned in my last blog, asking kids and their parents what they wanted from their holiday, found only one point of agreement. Good weather. That priority made it into the top three choices in every age group. My family’s no different. If a destination threatens to have a cloudy sky, we cross it off the summer holiday list. At the same time, the kids were whinging tonight that they couldn’t get to sleep because of the humidity here, at home.

I don’t think it’s because we live in the middle of a big city. I think it would be just the same if our home was a cottage in the Cotswold’s; I still think, while working, we want things to be cool. It’s only when we relax that we want the thermometer turned up. It’s as if feeling warm and chilling out go together.

But there’s hot – and there’s far too hot for the kids and me. We wanted to go to Libya, but August in that area seems to be too much of a challenge as far as the temperature is concerned. As you know, we’ve been planning a weekend in Rome for far too long, but that, too, has been put on hold, in the belief that it’s too steamy in August to wander around the Coliseum.

But last weekend, we bucked the heat trend. We stayed at The Grove hotel, dubbed ‘London’s Country Estate’ for it’s palatial grounds and extreme proximity to the M25. The Engish weather wasn’t warm. In fact, Saturday was quite fresh. But we braced the outdoor pool and quite enjoyed it. Feeling a little chilly was a new sensation. We should try it more often.

But still, as I search now for our summer break, I can’t but pursue the sun.