St Swithin has always been one of those saints who feels less like a figure from a dusty manuscript and more like a quiet companion who walks beside us through the British summer. His day arrives every fifteenth of July, slipping into the calendar with a kind of gentle authority, and suddenly the weather feels as though it has stepped into an old story. The legend is simple, memorable and wonderfully dramatic. Whatever the sky chooses today it will keep choosing for forty days more.

The old rhyme still carries its charm:

St Swithin’s day, if thou dost rain,

For forty days it will remain.

St Swithin’s day, if thou be fair,

For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.

A neat little prophecy wrapped in four lines. A reminder that our ancestors watched the clouds with the same mixture of hope and dread that we do.

And today the sun is not merely fair. It is triumphant. It is hot, so very very hot. The kind of heat that makes the air wobble above the roads and the kind of heat that makes every Welsh hillside look as though it is glowing from within. You step outside and the world feels like a kiln. You step back inside and the world feels like a sauna. Even the shade seems to have given up and joined the sun in its mischief.

If the old rhyme holds true we are now standing at the doorway of forty more days of this blazing splendour. Forty days of shirts sticking to backs. Forty days of cold drinks vanishing faster than you can pour them. Forty days of dogs lying on cool floors with expressions that say they blame us personally for the weather. There is something delightful about it though. Something mythic. As if the land has decided to remind us that folklore is not dead. It is alive and warm and occasionally scorching.

St Swithin’s Day always feels like a moment when the past taps us on the shoulder. Today it has done so with a sunbeam that feels more like a spotlight. We are living inside a story and the story is glowing.

Now, in the spirit of survival and sanity, does anyone know of any good ice cream machines?