Being in London this week has been like having your home teleported somewhere else: You look around and everything is the same, but isn’t. The air is like Florida’s, hot and heavy to touch, the haze like a postcard of Los Angeles. My son went to school this morning in shorts, a vest, and a baseball cap that he turned backwards, as if he were actually in America. A mosquito buzzed in my ear as I sat in my darkened living room, the curtains drawn tight to keep the sun out. We don’t have air-conditioning in England, you see. That is the kind of thing people have in other countries, where the weather is extreme, where you go indoors to escape the heat—and where there are mosquitoes.

In some places, air-con is ubiquitous. In others, it is a status symbol. For most Brits, status usually means having a Victorian home, double-fronted if you can afford it, with as many touches of the countryside as possible, even if that means a cold, drafty house in the winter and a stifling one in the summer. Really posh Brits pretend they are country folk, dressing themselves in worn-out clothes. Air-con is a bit new money—a bit foreign, a bit American. Not for much longer, if this heat continues.

The weather is changing, and so will our children’s memories of England. To them, it may well be a place of air-conditioning, and vineyards. For the rest of us, this weather feels foreign and new, which, necessarily, stirs nostalgia for what has been lost. I remember being on holiday and putting my hand out of the window and the air being hot, which blew my mind. At home, I was accustomed to mild summer days spent playing on the village green, winter walks and a fire when I got home, and snow drifts in the fields behind the house. All of this sounds like some kind of John Major fantasy of bucolic England, but that’s largely because that England, a gentle England, did and does exist.