Valenciennes; Friday, 26 June, 2026

Officially there was a red heat health and red weather alert in place, after three days of mid-30s temperatures during the day and plus 20 temperatures at night, with the rail companies saying you should only travel if necessary. With two more tropical nights in London on the cards, I considered getting to Air-Conditioned hotels was a necessity so headed up into town.

Of the four weeks journeys up to St Pancras this was about the smoothest, once again opting to stay on the train to London Bridge in the nice cool aircon, this time easily getting to St Pancras ahead of the local train that I would otherwise have caught as there were problems with the central part of the Thameslink network and everything was in a mess, it meant I made a train from London Bridge that was running around 20 minutes late and ended up at St Pancras a little before 6pm.

I grabbed some dinner from the M&S and then joined the queue to checkin which was being held back for some time as Eurostar was also suffering delays, and the lounge had become too full, so they needed to hold us back from checking in until after they’d loaded up and dispatched a train.

In the end it was about a 15 minute wait in the queue in a very warm St Pancras before we were allowed through into the slightly cooler security and immigration area and after another very smooth journey thorough into the lounge.

I was through just after 18:30 and ominously the 18:01 to Paris and the 18:04 to Amsterdam still hadn’t started boarding, plus the 19:01 to Paris was cancelled. There appeared to be general chaos going on with so many people waiting for trains, and it was pretty clear we were going to be heavily delayed.

In the end my 19:34 departure was finally called forward for boarding at about 20:15 and we all headed down to the platform, clearly not to the enjoyment of the passengers for the 18:01 who were still waiting (in the end, checking later on Real Time Train, they wouldn’t leave until 21:26 nearly 3½ hours late and after the 20:01 had departed!) The boarding was pretty quick and in the end we were on our way barely 10 minutes after the first call, 50 minutes behind schedule.

We didn’t make up any time on the journey and pulled into Lille 50 minutes late as well, and into a station that was clearly only just starting to cool down from the even hotter temperatures that northern France had been experiencing for the previous few days.

I walked the 800m or so to my hotel for the night, in a different location to the previous weekends, as it had been cheaper than the other options – this weekend had been very expensive for hotels in Lille as there were a number of events that were supposed to have taken place, but had all been cancelled in the proceeding 48 hours due to the ongoing scorching weather, though that hadn’t brough the hotel prices down – as I suspect most people with bookings were turning up just to get the aircon.

It turned out that I was the last person to checkin for the evening, with one of the two receptionists very happy as it meant they could finish early with no more guests due to arrive in a sold out hotel. A quick and very friendly check-in and an equally quick and friendly trip to the bar to redeem my welcome drink which I took up to my room, cranked the aircon on full blast and the temperature to Arctic and let the room quickly cool down to the point where I would need the duvet.