`The mass of men," wrote Henry Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation."
The English poet A.E. Housman, on the other hand, was more restrained when he expressed the same idea: "The normal condition of mankind is one of just tolerable discontent." The whole concept is put in its true meteorological context by the little rhyme that goes: As a rule a man's a fool: When it's hot he wants it cool, When its cool he wants it hot, Always wanting what is not.
It all depends, of course, on what you are accustomed to. In Ireland, for example, a summer day with a temperature of, say, 20 degrees, is thought of as being warm and pleasant; 25 degrees is getting hot; while 30 degrees is something of a scorcher.
The highest temperature ever recorded in Ireland since instrumental records began about 150 years ago was 33 degrees at Kilkenny in June, 1887, and that, one might think, must have been quite unbearable.
But today where I live in Germany, the thermometer topped 35 degrees.
Everyone thinks of it as rather hot, perhaps a little too much so to be too active, but it is considered nothing very much outside the ordinary. To be considered very unpleasant here, the temperature would need to rise another five degrees, and a day in summer where the temperature is only 25 degrees is looked on as a little cool.
In the really hot countries of southern Europe - Turkey, Greece and Spain during the summer months - the temperature needs to soar to the high 40s before it is though of as excessive, and to 50 degrees to be considered freakish.
The hottest place in the world is reckoned to be the aptly named Death Valley in southern California. The deep gorge is surrounded by tall mountains that soar to 10,000 feet or more above the valley floor, and is baked lifeless during the summer months by a merciless sun and desiccating winds. Its reputation as a hell on Earth was sealed in July and August 1917, when the temperature in the valley exceeded 50 degrees in the shade for 43 consecutive days.
But it was not in Death Valley that the highest ever air temperature was recorded. The highest thermometer reading in the Californian valley was 57 degrees, but this figure was topped in September 1922, in a place called al'Aziziyah in Libya; the official temperature there touched 58 degrees - a clear world record, both before and since, and yet to be equalled despite our current fears of global warming.