"A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart."

Sound familiar? Laurie Lee’s evocation of 1920s Gloucestershire in Cider With Rosie is usually read with the sorrowful sense that they don’t do summers like that any more. But as we are discovering, that’s not true.

Many of us woke this morning to another cloudless blue sky. It was so warm by breakfast we might still have been in the shower. I find it hard to credit that four months ago the room in which I am sitting was so cold I could see my breath. Now, the windows are flung open and from the garden I can hear bees buzzing like a strimmer at full throttle. The grass is turning yellow, and birds dart from the shade of the bushes to the cover of the trees. When neighbours pass, revealing legs not seen since they last competed in an egg and spoon race, there is only one topic of conversation: not the World Cup, not Nicola Sturgeon’s Cabinet reshuffle. The big news – the only news – is what the thermometer is saying.

Last month, when I returned from a long trip, friends gloated that summer had been and gone. It was an echo of the Swann and Flanders sketch where one of them says he missed last year’s summer because he was in the toilet. As I write, with the mercury fast rising, I think of neighbours who recently left the country, intent on escaping the showers and gales by heading to the Med.

Who will be first to tell them that while they’ve been gone, we have enjoyed the best summer in decades? With the possible exception of Shetland, where a traditionally chilly June has maintained its grip, we have all been baking. In France and Italy, where droves of sun-seekers have decamped, the heat is only marginally more intense – and let’s not forget they have the kind of flies and bugs that make clegs and midgies look benign.

If we could be guaranteed a month of this weather every year, would we ever need to travel abroad for the sun? One of the reasons Cider with Rosie is so popular is that it touches a chord with all of us who spent our childhood summer holidays out of doors. When the weather is this glorious, you recall the simple pleasures of old-fashioned holidays close to home: making mud pies in the garden, larking around with the hose; climbing trees, racing bikes, and running to the fridge for lemonade. The hours we used to spend collecting sea shells, making sandcastles, poking around in rockpools or rivers, trying to catch tiddlers in our nets. Or lying in a field, or up a tree, reading.

These and countless other outdoors days are, as for Laurie Lee, what you remember from childhood. Great literature has yet to be made from the airport lounge or the queue for customs. It comes from the pastimes that lodge deep in the memory, as rich in scents, colour and taste as in what you actually did. My version of Proust’s madeleine is vanilla ice-cream on a stick with chocolate nose and eyes, which had begun to melt even before you’d handed over your money.

All this sounds like a descent into sentimentality, but it has a deeper purpose than merely recalling times past. A spell of warmth is a reminder that there’s a place for less ambitious summer plans, a way of having a holiday which gives children more time to be themselves. I can think of nothing worse as a youngster (or adult) than to be confined in a car on the endless drive from here to the continent, or bundled onboard a plane, where hours of enforced immobility threaten to destroy the feel-good factor. Compare that with a week here, near a beach or river, a hayfield or a wood.

This is not to criticise those who crave the sun on their back and dream of the white sands of Crete or the Costas. In the wind-bitten north, surely that includes most of us. Yet if a heat wave arrived like clockwork, how differently we’d think about holidays. In June, July and August, our homeland would become a playground for us as well as visitors. Trips to Spain or Greece would be an added bonus rather than a meteorological necessity. And we would discover more of what lies nearby.

Overseas crowds flocking to Scotland this week have come to view those marvels we are too jaded to notice. They’ll be astonished to have hit the jackpot in terms of heat, but not as startled as we are. As we dust down the deckchairs and replenish the ice tray, what a chance to stay at home and enjoy – pace Lee – “summer, June summer, with the green back on earth and the whole world unlocked and seething....”.