You know when it's hot here because a heavy stillness descends on everything like an atomised syrup. All is quiet except the occasional protest of a magpie('oh lord, it's boiling!') and the humming of the refrigerator. When it gets very hot, somewhere in the order of 40 degrees and over, even time seems to lag, as if the clocks are loath to push their frail hands through the clammy air.

It is always best to try to sit with the heat. This old cottage begins baking about mid-morning and without air-conditioning, there is little left to do but get used to it. I took an early swim as did many others, and now it seems everyone has retreated indoors, some, I guess, to the vast climate-controlled cathedrals of the modern era, down in Sydney.

Ken Slessor's masterful Country Towns best captures for me the feeling of a typical hot Australian summer's day. Sure, it's set in rural Australia but Hazelbrook is a kind of hybrid, neither country town nor suburb, lost in the nameless middle. The following are verses 3 and 4 from that poem.

'Verandas baked with musky sleep,
Mulberry faces dozing deep,
And dogs that lick the sunlight up
Like paste of gold – or, roused in vain
By far, mysterious buggy-wheels,
Lower their ears, and drowse again….

Country towns with your schooner bees,
And locusts burnt in the pepper-trees,
Drown me with syrups, arch your boughs,
Find me a bench, and let me snore,
Till, charged with ale and unconcern,
I'll think it's noon at half-past four!'