Yesterday I bought an ice cream in the pouring rain in Borehamwood, on the edge of London.
I thought the grocery shop owner might have been grateful. Instead, he laughed.
Fair enough.
But my parents told me, if it is very hot, you should drink a cup of hot tea. That will make you feel hot inside your body and there will be less of a temperature difference between the inside and outside, so you will feel cooler.
By the same token, if it is cold outside and you eat ice cream, you will be colder inside your body and, by lessening the comparative difference between inside and outside, you will feel less cold.
My father was stationed in the island of Malta in the Mediterranean during World War 2 – he was in the British Navy – and the Maltese, he said, drank hot tea during heatwaves.
You sweat initially but, once the inside of your body warms up, you feel the heat outside your body less.
When I was a schoolboy growing up in Aberdeen, in the NE of Scotland, I once made a shop owner very happy by buying an ice cream during a snow storm. He said it was his only sale of the morning.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 