The heat takes me back to stuffy classrooms clad head to toe in polyester

The best descriptions of summer heat, in my view, come from Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, a novel in which "the world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer... like a silent crazy jungle under glass".

- Emma Brockes

MondayThe best descriptions of summer heat, in my view, come from Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, a novel in which "the world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer... like a silent crazy jungle under glass". Or from Muriel Spark, in her short story The Seraph and the Zambezi set in southern Africa in 1946, where "the heat distorted every word" and sound, writes Spark, "reached my ears a fraction behind time". Of a bunch of white settlers enjoying pink gins on the terrace, she writes: "The glasses made a tinkle that was not of the substance of glass, but of bottles wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes for a moment, a shriek or a cackle would hang torpidly in space, but these were unreal sounds as if projected from a distant country."

This week, much of Britain enjoyed an unbroken run of 30C days and we were all yanked back to that distant country - the one in which we sat in hot classrooms clad head to toe in polyester, wilting to L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between. "In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature," wrote Hartley - and no matter how many summers we've been through, this fact seems to surprise every time.

What struck me this week as temperatures soared was how particular each heatwave is to its locality. In New York, summer comes with light as harsh and unshaded as fluorescent strip lighting and the sky is an angry blue. In the southern hemisphere, where the sun is at its strongest, you can walk down the street and feel the heat on your back like a hand, pushing.