It's been rather hot
It's been so hot. It's now the end of August, and I have the feeling we've had 30°C weather here in the Netherlands for maybe 2 months. With some breaks: approx 2 x 2-day periods with cool air and perhaps rain; there were also a couple of thunderstorms, but they generally didn't finish the heat off.
Lots of people like hot weather but here in a "cooler" country the houses aren't built to cope well with it. Our rented house is lovely but it's a sun-trap, with big windows and the sun on the roof. If our big windows had shutters on, that would be great against the heat. The builders did design ways to ventilate the place, not least a nice front-door grille which in theory should allow air to circulate from the bottom to the top of the house. But the air has been so still that this hasn't had as much effect as you'd expect.
Our main living space has been above 30 degrees in the afternoon/evening for most of this period, making it hard to concentrate, hard to relax, etc. On the hottest day we desperately covered the windows with tinfoil to keep the sun at bay, plus of course the usual stuff (windows open in the night/morning while the air is cool; windows and curtains closed in the afternoon; wet towels hung up to transpire). Even so, our living space reached 36.5°C indoors, and the thermostat on our central heating measured "E" (error) instead of a temperature, because it wasn't designed to expect temperatures in that range.
On hot days, we escape the heat: we've been to the museum, the cinema, walking round the canals, sitting out in the pub. The thought process isn't so much "What would be nice" as "What would be cooler?" -- But then, we had to close some windows when we went out, so the house would be pretty roasty on our return.
Why note all this down? I'm not trying to impress - these temperatures are normal in many places (though the housing is presumably designed for it), and I'm sure there are worse houses to live in, even in this same city. I'm noting it down because in future years we'll be living in different housing, different places, and different climates. What will it be like then? It'll be interesting to compare.
To get some idea, here's a plot of the 2022-so-far temperature records from a nearby weather station, as rendered by WeatherSpark (sorry it's in Fahrenheit, there seems to be no option to change this):
What do we see? Well in July-August there were maybe 3 chunks of time when the temperature went above 30°C (86°F), and this was also higher than the 90-percentile high range for daily max temperatures (i.e. outside the red bands in the image). Plenty of times when it was well within normal ranges.