This sunny weather is a reminder of the stifling heat of the night

In London, the buildings are closer, the air is less fresh and everyone else has had a toke on it before it gets passed to you
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Sunset in London
'That feeling of night-time heat can be so powerful when it first seizes you.' Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

When I used to take acid, the absolute highlight of the night was the bit when I wasn't on acid any more. And so it is with a heatwave. You spend months, maybe years, praying for the clouds to part, so that friendly sphere of hot plasma can have its wicked way with you. You long for it to wrap itself around your body again, brightening up your days, like someone you used to have a thing with and you can't remember why it had to end.

After two days tops you're all, dear God, now I remember why this was never supposed to last. You can't get any work finished in the daytime, you can't sleep at night, and feeling hot and sticky between your thighs has little to do with sex, as you toss and turn in bed, about as comfortable as Charles Saatchi's PR adviser. In fact your most rampant desire involving the person lying next to you is for them to get up, go to the kitchen and swap your pillowcase for one they've secretly been stashing in the fridge-freezer.

Going to bed naked, something you longed for during the 100-year pyjama wars, makes you feel less like a sultry Latin lover and more like a Pritt Stick. Even your dog, initially so thrilled about the whole outdoors skipping-like-a-mental-thing, is reduced to panting in the manner of a born-again asthmatic.

And yet, and yet. That feeling of night-time heat can be so powerful when it first seizes you. As a pale white kid from Yorkshire, I remember the first time I found out that darkness could also be hot. I was five, on holiday in Sicily, and I opened the car door after a long drive, only to be met with a blast of heat. It was night outside, therefore it should have been cold, but it felt like being violently assaulted by a soft flannel. Mount Etna had erupted nearby and I didn't know this heat was normal in other countries – I grew quietly excited, as we picked up bits of cooled lava that had reached the road, that the volcano was coming for us.

Years later, something of that feeling returned to me on a journalism trip to Tel Aviv. Sitting outside a street cafe at midnight; a hot, dark, Middle Eastern midnight, beside stalls selling fresh pomegranate juice, the smell of jasmine, the bodyguards with guns. Everyone stopped to stare as a cloud of bats swarmed down the street, a hot black flutter swooping past the overhead tangle of telegraph wires; the vivid, whooshing noise as they passed.

My friend Amy, who lives on Orkney, goes out bird-watching and taking photos on the island after dark, sometimes in the early hours. The sky is streaked with the world's highest type of cloud, visible only in summer after the sun has set. These clouds, which glow in the dark with a blue-white light, are apparently called noctilucent – the Latin for "night shining". They look like static interference pulled into threads. Like sinewy ghosts. Amy says a herd of black cows charged towards her when she was out looking at the night shinings last night.

Here in London, the buildings are so much closer together, the air is less fresh and you have to resign yourself to the fact that everyone else has had a toke on it before it gets passed to you. There are no stampeding cows, only stampeding drunks falling out of public houses, sent slightly delirious by the heady combination of 30°C sun and lilting Belgian lagers.

I used to enjoy the odd guilty laugh at a blog called Goths in Hot Weather, which showcased photographs of people wearing layers of purple velvet, black lace and studded dog collars on sunny days. Until I heard myself complaining this morning that I didn't know how to dress in the sun, that I didn't know where to put all these long hot limbs.

I started to wonder if my slightly awkward collection of thin, floppy garments couldn't at least be given some kind of structure. Maybe I should just put some makeup on after all. Some nice thick black eyeliner. And a crucifix. And three layers of ripped fishnet tights. Oh, it's time to come clean and admit it – they had the right idea all along. We are all goths in hot weather now.

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