“ARE you cold?”

“No, I’m baking.”

“I’m freezing!”

Thus goes the daily conversation at Adver HQ over the air conditioning, which seems to have every setting imaginable except the one which says ‘make this office a normal temperature acceptable to and comfortable for everyone’.

I worked in the office of our sister paper in Oxford for a while where the air con was so ferocious you had to wear winter clothes in the height of summer and your hands would still go numb. And you’d look like a lunatic stepping out at lunchtime into glorious sunshine while sweating in layers of wool. As only one man has access to the controls and he only worked part time, you pretty much just had to suffer.

Meanwhile in Swindon by about 3.30 in the afternoon, you can often be forgiven for thinking you’re in a sauna, not in an office. We have a little routine wherein we take it in turns to sneak up to the controls and change them to our own personal preference and then wait about 10 minutes before somebody notices and changes them again. Still, it gives us a bit of exercise and a screen break.

So I can sympathise with the staff at the Designer Outlet who had to endure the rare treat of some bank holiday sunshine as the air con became, shall we say, temperamental, leaving its inhabitants feeling ill from the heat.

But I think the key point here is, as our reporter wrote, ‘temperatures soared to 22C’.

Yep, 22C. I’ve lived abroad in Israel and Australia where temperatures really did soar - to the mid 40s. And yet every building you entered was cooled to perfection. No weird draughts, no noisy churning sound, no direct blasts of air that will dry your eyeballs out before you’ve had a chance to blink.

I can’t help thinking that when it comes to handing out air conditioning systems, we’re at the back of the queue.

“Really great air con system? Send it to Oz, they will need it there... shonky air con system that wafts the air around sporadically and blows hot and cold? Give it to Britain, their weather’s rubbish anyway.”

So what is it about Britain, a temperate country, where heatwaves and snow are relatively rare experiences, that we can’t cope with a little bit of sunshine?

We can’t handle a patch of dry weather without declaring a drought and banning hosepipes or insisting we all share the same bath water. If it snows, the schools close down and people struggle to make it in to work on time. If it rains, we flood, if it’s windy, everything falls over...

For a nation obsessed with the weather, it seems we’re just not very good at it.

Animals shouldn’t be locked up

MY sympathies go to the family of Rosa King, pictured, right, the zoo keeper who died when a tiger entered the enclosure where she was working.

What a terrible accident and what a terrible loss for her family, friends and colleagues.

But surely this must raise the question of whether we should be keeping wild animals in zoos.

No matter how generous the enclosure, or how marvellous the staff caring for the animals, they are not meant for captivity.

Many will argue that zoos are vital to conservation, but if conservation really is the key aim, wouldn’t that be better achieved by creating safe zones in the animals’ natural habitat where they can receive the care and support of experts while roaming their true territory?

No animal from the savannah will ever truly be happy locked up in dreary, grey Britain.

  • LET’S hope by the time this goes into print that the police have recaptured escaped prisoner Michal Kisiel.

It is the stuff of TV dramas and urban legends - we are being warned to watch out for a man who is armed and dangerous and who is in no circumstances to be approached.

It certainly sends a shiver down the spine.

Thirty-year-old Kisiel escaped from Salisbury District Hospital, where he’d been treated for a head wound, on Tuesday night.

I also hope the hospital is reviewing its security to ensure nothing like this can ever happen again.