I’ll have you know that I was there in 1976, which was a heatwave and a half.

It struck me, the other day, as I was sweltering in the garden and reaching for another glass of Lemon Barley Water, that Britain can be split down the middle - between those who can remember the unforgettable summer of 1976 and those who are too young.

Lots of comparisons have been made between that year and the weather we’ve had this year, but when I started thinking back, I realised it isn’t the similarities that are most striking, but the differences.

For one thing, the summer of 1976 followed a whole year of low rainfall, whereas the spring of 2018 was sopping wet, meaning it is only a heatwave this time, but last time it was a proper drought.

I was only 15, but I can remember the hosepipe ban and the threat of standpipes in the streets (although we never saw one in the end).

However, what most of us remember most about it was the advice we were given to ‘bath with a friend.’

A myth has persisted that bathing with a friend was official advice, probably because the Government appointed an emergency Minister For Drought (Denis Howell), who did lay down some basic guidelines to alleviate the crisis.

But while we were told to limit ourselves to five inches of bath water and throw it on the garden afterwards, the Government had nothing to say about whether you should share your five inches with somebody else.

Today they would need to point out that five inches is about 13cm, but then they probably wouldn’t bother issuing advice about baths, now that the overwhelming majority of us take showers instead.

I haven’t had a bath for months.

Yet, our lifestyle in 1976 was such that part of the water-saving campaign was aimed at trying to get more people to give up baths altogether and switch to new-fangled showers.

The idea of bathing with a friend provoked so much nudging and winking and giggling, it was like living through a real-life Carry On film, in a way, and on a scale that just wouldn’t happen nowadays.

And the more you think about it, the more life was different, back then, compared with now.

Somebody once said that the past is a foreign country, and “they do things differently there”.

Well, 1976 is not so much a foreign country as another planet. Life in the summer of 1976 included all kinds of things that those of us who can remember it would need to explain to youngsters.

They include Green Shield stamps, Skylab, ‘Clunk-click every trip’, the Corona man, A & B button telephones and party lines, HTV and Midlands, Swap Shop and Tiswas, the Green Cross Man, Woolworth’s, Spangles, X films, pay packets, Teasmades, Double Diamond, chicken-in-the-basket, and apartheid.

On the other hand, things that we have now that I had never heard of in 1976 (for better or worse) include: all TV channels except BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, Brexit, the internet, Trivial Pursuit, remote controls, trick or treat, cappucinos, central locking, GPS, cycle helmets, mobile phones, laptops, decking, chicken tikka, Lidl and Aldi, fake news, school proms, reality TV, and Gay Pride - but not global warming.

Believe it or not, we were introduced to ‘the greenhouse effect’ (effectively the old name for global warming or climate change) as long ago as 1972.

So - believe it or not - it has taken some of us 46 years to wake up to it and stop denying it. If you didn’t believe it in 1976, you’d better believe it now.