Make men’s shorts socially acceptable |
For a country which loves to talk about the weather, we do not do it very well. They order these things much better in the United States.
It helps that the US resisted the wholesale adoption of centigrade. Celsius, while fine for performing nerdy scientific experiments, is insufficiently granular for everyday use. I favour a uniquely British measure of temperature known as the tabloid scale, where very low temperatures are denoted in Celsius but high temperatures are given in Fahrenheit. (No Sun journalist should be made to write ‘Temperatures are set to soar into the low- to mid-30s’; it simply doesn’t work.)
But the other American practice we need to adopt is the ‘feels-like’ temperature. They use this in weather forecasts to denote the perceptual effects of heat rather than the objective temperature.
Spectator summer party 2026, in pictures
Reform is right to fear the return of Boris
John Power and William Atkinson
Revealed: the shady funding of net zero
The human body does not measure temperature, it feels it. And it feels it most........