'We all need a bit of romance...'

BBC weather presenter Carol Kirkwood is back with a new romance, Meet Me at Sunset. She explains why she's so drawn to glamour, escapism and romance.

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DOES anyone in Britain really get through a day without mentioning the weather?

"I find all weather exciting, but you have to watch your language, because not everybody likes heat," says BBC weather presenter Carol Kirkwood, who adores sunshine but understands why 30C can send us into a hot, bothered and tremendously sticky spin.

For the vulnerable and elderly, heatwaves can even prove fatal. "Don't be like, 'Oh, it's going to be a fabulous day,' just state the fact: 'It's going to be sunny and dry today. It's also going to be hot, temperatures getting up to 32 or 33 degree celsius..."

Her tone at this point, so familiar to those that have watched her almost every day for the best part of 28 years, makes speaking to a weather presenter about the weather feel rather meta.

Scottish meteorologist Kirkwood, 63, is not only on the frontline, reporting on increasingly volatile weather systems and climate change ("When I was growing up, there were four seasons, you had a definite winter, spring, summer and autumn. Now a lot of them tend to merge,"), she is also an ambassador for sheer escapism from such topics.

"[Escapism is] always valuable because it takes you into another world, and you can leave your problems behind for as long as you're reading the book," she says. "There's so many things going on in the world, it's nice just to stick your nose in a book and forget about it for a time."

Hence her fifth novel, Meet Me at Sunset, a dramatic romance about a fashion designer called Camille Fontaine, who is "running away from a shattered love affair" and whose secret-filled past is on the brink of overflowing into her present. More than your classic boy-meets-girl romp, Kirkwood says: "I really hope you think at the end of it, 'I didn't see that coming."