There is a particular summer weather that I – and perhaps I alone – love. Hot, overcast and damp. The days when the air feels like the breath of a particularly big and lusty dog. The days when thunder is always imminent. The days when you start to use a council tax bill as a makeshift fan across your neck on the train.

Why am I so drawn to this heavy, expectant clamminess? This overcast sense of excitement? Because – and this is not the time for euphemism – I am a sweaty woman. I contain rivulets. Along my temples, under my breasts, across both armpits, behind my knee; I am as slick and shiny as a pebble on the seashore. And when the weather turns humid, you all simply meet me where I stand.

Suddenly, I have comrades, complaining that their thigh has become welded to their plastic chair; dabbing at their top lip with a sleeve; staining their ill-planned shirts with continent-shaped sweat patches. You people become my people; slipping through life on a sweaty sheen.

One of the reasons I sweat is because I move around a lot. I cycle to meetings, arriving with a rucksack imprint of damp across my back in both July and January.........

© The Guardian