'I hide in the toilet to stay cool in the heat'

A retired couple living at the top of a 12-storey tower block say they have been hiding in the toilet to stay cool during the heatwave.

Bill Gairns and Pam Nesbitt, both 75, live in the flat in Worcester, which was under a red weather warning for extreme heat issued by the Met Office this week.

The pair, who are usually very active, said they could not go out during the day because it was "too hot".

Nesbitt said despite the usual advice to keep windows closed, they were forced to keep them open in their home as heat rises and they were "absolutely cooked up here".

"You can't breathe; it's just too much to sit and not have the windows open," she explained.

"We sit here; we have a towel, and we mop our brows, and we cope with it. We perspire or glow… not sweat."

Garrins said their flat was uncomfortable from about 15:00 BST into the night, where temperatures fluctuated.

But he said the room became stifling hot when any breeze disappeared.

"I go to the toilet a lot, because the little toilet room is the coolest room in the house at the moment," he said.

"It's quite good, it's quite nice; just go and hide."

An amber warning for extreme heat is currently in place across parts of Worcestershire until Saturday as the hot and humid weather continues.

Speaking of a previous period of unusually hot summer weather which saw weeks of high temperatures in 1976, Garrins described the weather as "what goes around comes around".

"We'll get this and then we'll get our rain again and everybody will moan, and then we'll get sunshine, and everybody will moan because it's too hot," he explained.

"And then we'll be back in winter and it'll be cold for a few months."

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