Would anyone care for a sauna?

It rained in the night...my thanks to those of you in Upover who pushed a little rain in our direction. We needed it. We need more.
What we don't need is the heat that has remained with it.
It puzzles me how people can enjoy living in the tropics. "Hot" isn't something I enjoy. "Hot and wet" is worse, much worse. I am not a happy cat.
I was born on a hot day and my late mother said I complained about the heat then. Apparently I succumbed to one heat rash after another and that probably made me feel uncomfortable and miserable.
The Senior Cat isn't much better. He was reminiscing yesterday about the way his mother managed on nothing more than a tiny "personal" fan. I remember it as being black and very small.
But we both agreed "the house was different". It was.
The house my paternal grandparents lived in was a solid stone structure. There were verandahs to the front,back and one side. The other side was close to, and thus protected by, a neighbour's house.
It took a long time for my grandparent's home to "warm up" in the summer. Only a prolonged heat wave would make it unbearable. Of course they also had the advantage of trees and the "buffalo grass" lawn and the sea not too far away. All those things made a significant difference. We spent hours playing on the lawn - when we weren't down on the beach.
Our house does not have the wide verandahs that the first settlers favoured. Houses simply don't get built like that any more.  Still, our house is old enough to have small eaves and every year the glory vine grows enough to help keep the sun off the northern side of the house. People comment on the difference that makes. 
And, we have air-conditioning now. The Senior Cat needs it and, I have to confess, I like it. Still, the Senior Cat was wondering if he would need it in the house his parents owned. Are summers really warmer? He wondered about that. We came to the conclusion they might be.
But the other thing is those verandahs and those eaves. The duplexes which have been built opposite have no eaves at all. They get the full afternoon sun. The new owners, with the young family, on one side have planted their tiny front garden with things designed to eventually grow and block out some of that sun - but it will take a while. 
     "We were lucky to get this place but why they couldn't at least do something..." M... told me the other day. He isn't impressed with modern house design although he knows why places are built the way they are. It's all to do with the amount of internal space that can be made available for the same cost - and how much people will be asked to pay in rates and taxes as a consequence. People are living in bigger houses on smaller pieces of land. There is no room to plant that lawn which helps to keep the place cool and those verandahs have long since gone.
Of course that means that people also use more electricity and that costs more too. 
Perhaps it is time to change the way we think about building houses. Those wide verandahs were environmentally responsible weren't they? And those lawns were great places to play on.