If the weather really has got too hot for Vietnamese animals, it may require a more serious explanation; and I believe I may have found it.Earlier this year, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Dr Roger Nelson, of Princeton University, reported that the weather really was better around the university than chance would predict. Specifically, it seldom rains on Commencement Day, when 10,000 students gather in the open air. If it does rain, they have to gather, and steam, indoors, so there is a great deal of prayer for sun when the day comes up. And when he examined the records, going back 36 years, he found that over the four- day Commencement Day weekend Princeton was rained on less, and less often, than six neighbouring regions The difference was not huge: a matter of 5 per cent.

But it was noticeable, and the explanation which struck him was the one half-jokingly believed in by the university itself: that positive thinking can sometimes affect the weather. If it is the case that concentrated human longing can affect the weather, it would explain a lot of things. The rain when England play Australia - has anyone done an analysis of whether it rains more when England plays a stronger team, or would it make no difference, because they never play any other sort of cricketers?The rain in Wimbledon is another obvious case. Of course, this year it rained and British players did well, but no one was expecting them to, and the rain had probably been ordered in advance.This month's heat wave is simply a reaction to all the longings expressed in June, so watch out. Every time you groan and and long for rain and cool, soft breezes, you store up trouble in heaven.

Your prayers will be heard: the weather will swing once more in wild exaggeration. By winter, I predict, Britain will be gripped by arctic weather Snow will fall.. Full marks to young Sarah Briggs, the Mansfield schoolgirl who refused to back down over her comments in a local newspaper. Sarah told the paper that she and her fellow students had not had the quality of teaching to which they felt entitled, because of, amongst other things, an overuse of temporary teachers. No-one from the school contested that point, though they suggested that it might not be the whole story. But they demonstrated what was wrong with the ethos of the school by demanding that the girl apologise for having told the truth as she saw it.

The decision by the Briggs family to back Sarah's refusal to say sorry led to her suspension until this week, when the school's governors eventually backed down. Like most people who show great courage, Sarah Briggs seems slightly puzzled by people's regard for her. After all, from her point of view all she did was answer some straight questions honestly. She was promised something by grown-ups - decent teaching that would help her to pass exams - and she didn't get it However, others did apologise, under pressure. The crime here is that, as ever, adults (except, of course, Sarah's parents) chose not to listen to children; instead the grown-ups insisted that they either kept silent or repeated what they had been told to say.

It's a rotten lesson - do as you're told , and you'll get by.All that said, the episode leaves me feeling a little uneasy. Is this what generations of adolescent protest has come to - this sensible, moderate, pragmatic, basically unthreatening wagging of the finger at a failure to deliver our promises? The nearest we get to youthful undermining of the social order is the activity of a few anoraks on the internet. Worse still, young people's protest is all too often understood and supported by parents. Now, that's seriously weird.The role of those unsullied by responsibility and experience should be to compel the rest of us to stare at the ugly gap between what we say we want to achieve and what we actually do.