RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: However did we survive summer without amber UV alerts and Nanny ordering us to stay indoors, keep hydrated and wear sunscreen?

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Wear tin hats, curtains closed, stay hydrated or YOU WILL ALL DIE!

If you need to go out, wear ‘appropriate clothing’. A burka and a fedora should do the trick. However, avoid the hours between 11:00 and 15:00.

We’re talking Mad Dogs and the British here.

When I read on Friday that this would be the hottest May bank holiday since 1944, I thought to myself: So that’s how the column unraveled, Rich.

You knew air raid sirens were blaring everywhere from the Met Office to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). They live like this for days.

Predictably, the warnings came thick and fast and became increasingly alarming as temperatures rose above 90 degrees in the old currency.

El Nino is coming, El Nino is coming! Don’t panic!

El Nino? They make him out to be the leader of a Mexican drug cartel, but more deadly.

It turns out that El Nino is a weather system in the Pacific Ocean and is responsible for the waters being warmer than normal. It has a sister called La Nina that does the exact opposite, but you don’t hear much about it because it doesn’t contribute to global warming.

While El Niño has been blamed for sunburn among day-trippers on the Brighton beach, it is also why weather experts are predicting a quieter-than-usual hurricane season in the Atlantic. Which must surely be a good thing?

Still, climate alarmists won’t let facts get in the way of a good horror story. So here in Britain, the propaganda machine is in overdrive again, even though it’s supposed to rain until the weekend.

UKHSA, the phoenix that emerged from the flames of the abolished and completely discredited Public Health England Agency, has issued an ‘amber’ alert. Stay inside, close the windows, draw the curtains, do not let your children play in the garden.

If you must go out, wear a hat and sunglasses, and in the words of Baz Luhrmann in his 1999 hit, Wear Sunscreen.

How old do they think we are; five? These are the same people who recently told us to tinfoil our windows.

The silly TV weather girls are instructing us to stay hydrated. Transport chiefs always tell us to carry a bottle of water. It’s the same old story at the time of year when the weather gets a little warmer than usual.

We have to endure as overexcited television reporters announce ‘record’ temperatures have been reached at Heathrow. So what? Who goes sunbathing on Runway Two?

All this is manna from Heaven for climate alarmists. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the last time it was this hot in May was in 1944, before global warming was invented.

Don’t they know there’s a war? Back then, no one was worried about sea levels or getting skin cancer.

This probably explains why my elderly mother arms herself like Gulliver every summer with just a box of Nivea and a jug of Pimm’s No 1. And he lived to be 93 years old.

But that generation consisted of tougher people. So I’d like to think my generation is like that. People try to suppress us, but some of us are old enough to remember the summer of 1976, when the heat wave lasted two months, the reservoirs and rivers dried up, and there were pipes in the streets.

This was Third World weather; 96 degrees in the shade. Too hot, in the shade.

The newspapers said, ‘Wow, what a scorcher!’ he wrote. headlines and fried eggs on the sidewalk. No one raised an ‘amber’ alert. We’ve just started.

There’s a whole industry today trying to scare us half to death and convince us that what we used to call ‘warm weather’ is due to man-made global warming.

The good news is that no one pays attention to this. Millions of us flocked to beaches, parks and swimming pools, ‘disregarding official warnings’, as some ridiculous headlines put it.

Last week, the Committee on Climate Change (whatever that is) announced that the Government should set maximum operating temperatures; It recommended 27C (80F) for ‘sedentary’ work and 25C (77F) for ‘light physical’ work.

A reminder for passengers to carry water with them when traveling is displayed at London’s Liverpool Street Station

Students go diving in the fountain in London’s Trafalgar Square during the 1976 heatwave

They didn’t have to bother. Nobody is going to work very hard these days anyway. They’re all still ‘Working from Home’, especially on hot days like this. Either that, or they’ll call in sick before heading to the pool or bar garden.

Make the most of May’s beloved buds while you can. This again isn’t 1944, but it’s worth noting that D-Day was postponed by just over a week due to bad weather. It’s not even the year that Labor MP Denis Howell, a former football referee, was appointed Drought Minister.

His solution was to bring in a Navajo medicine man to perform the rain dance. It worked amazingly well. Soon the heavens opened and within days Howell was reappointed Minister of Floods.

The ‘experts’ are predicting a long, hot Super El Niño summer this time around, but my best guess is that it will freeze and be crushed by the first Test match at Wimbledon.

No doubt by then the UKHSA and the Met Office will be warning us to stay dry and not leave home without an umbrella.

And they will also blame it on ‘climate change’ and El Niño. Don’t panic!