As the world burns, people head north, just like swallows

This week, she texted a horror emoji about her second amber warning, this time from home in the Pays Basque, for danger of death in 39C heat. “I want to come and live in the wind and rain of beautiful cool Scotland,” she said.

It used to be a weary trope. Living north of the border, you got mildly irritated hearing about heatwaves and drought down south as rain battered the windows and you lit the wood burner. You saw nothing remarkable in TV weather graphics forecasting 15C in Scotland and 30C in the south-east of England.

Routinely twice as cold, twice as wet, Scotland is where evenings warm enough to sit outside are as precious as rare jewels. Here you measure summers in fleeces: it will be two-fleece, one-fleece, maybe light-fleece if you’re lucky. But never, ever will it be no-fleece.

Dear chilly Scotland: even as I write, it’s 29C in London but it’s 14 here, and I’m one-fleece, contemplating a gilet.

No wonder sun-starved Scots flee to the costas and burn bright pink, a temporary badge of sharing what people in the rest of the world take for granted. But something is changing. There’s a shift emerging. People trapped in high temperatures have started fantasising about alternatives – and some of them are acting on it. This year I’ve been amazed by the people I know choosing to holiday in Scotland rather than Tuscany or Greece – and relishing the cool climate.

My son, who did go to Tuscany, almost melted. My old schoolfriend came from Islington to visit, delighting in chilly gardening. Other colleagues and friends fled the oven of London for the soul-balm of the West Highlands, where no one ever died of heatstroke.

I went north briefly myself, to Plockton and beyond, and it was as visually stunning and reassuringly two-fleece as ever.

As the world burns, could Scotland take on a new role, a Monaco of the future where the scenery is beautiful and rainfall abundant? A sanctuary for better-off climate refugees, inconvenienced by unbearably hot summers, who have the means to escape? I have pondered the question whimsically in the past – now I suspect I might be right.

Some things back up my theory. Sales of Scottish property to foreigners, especially Americans (though they may be fleeing Trump, not climate), are said to be up. I have European friends who’ve relocated here for business; when I apologise for the foul weather, they laugh: after living with temperatures in the high 30s, they adore it. Savills recorded sales above £500,000 rising 21% last quarter, with a growing number of London-based “super-commuters” relocating but maintaining careers in the south.

Meanwhile, National Records of Scotland reports high levels of inward migration swelling the population, which is projected to grow by more than 6% to 5.8 million in the next 25 years. In fact, figures suggest that Scotland, along with Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland and Switzerland, will experience some of the biggest proportional population rises in Europe.

Of course they’re coming. People are moving north, like swallows. It makes sense. If half the world’s 4,000 species are doing it, why wouldn’t humans? Even if we did invent air conditioning.

As someone who didn’t grow up here, I’ve always craved those warm, languorous English summer evenings in the garden. Maybe they’ll arrive in my lifetime.

And maybe midges will have gone. Maybe.

Photographs by Eric Kruszewski/Getty