It’s hot in Britain, have you heard? Train services had to be cancelled ahead of “Furnace Friday”. The Daily Mail is warning of a coming “plague of rats”. Channel 4 News says ice-cream factory workers have been working 12-hour shifts since April. It’s chaotic, it’s biblical. And now, to add insult to heat stress-related injury, Australia is making fun of the British again.

The Sydney Morning Herald put it bluntly after one recent day of record temperatures in Britain: “It was the hottest day of the year in the UK and Brits could not cope”. The Adelaide Advertiser told readers “why British people can’t handle heat — and we can”. A News.com.au report belittled Britain for panicking over a “pleasant” 33.3C: “It turns out their definition of ‘heatwave’ is dramatically different from ours.” Similarly sneering remarks abounded on Twitter – where News.com.au said “Poms” had “flocked … to gripe about the ‘unbearable’ weather” and sleeplessness “that apparently comes with night-time temperatures in the low- to mid-20s”.

To be fair, Britons in summer are very easy to make fun of – almost a pure comedic device, like a banana peel. The national tendency towards understatement juxtaposed with the farmers’ tans and sweaty brows, the tension between shelling out for some espadrilles or a pool float shaped like a swan and the weather’s inevitable turn for the worse, Nigella in the burkini. Comedy gold, all of it.

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Three weeks ago – before we’d even got to the really hot bit, as it transpired – we were advised in these very pages to conceal bags of frozen peas beneath our clothes while riding crowded buses and trains . We’re almost making it too easy for Australia, which places more national pride on its annual game of “You call that a heatwave? THIS is a heatwave” than it does on the Ashes. (Fair enough – it finds the Ashes harder to win.)

The lengths Australia goes to to establish its celsius supremacy is bemusing when the fact that it is a very hot country seems undisputed. I lived in Sydney for two and a half years and remember I would have sweat pooling on my skin after the 20-minute walk to work – for a 7am start. I’d stay late, not just until it was cool enough to walk home, but because the office was air-conditioned.

This past summer in Sydney (it’s winter now, remember – a nippy 21C) temperatures reached highs of 47C, and consecutive days of over 40C. Nationally it was the second-hottest summer on record. Western Australia exceeded 45C on four occasions in the last week of March. To be clear, that’s autumn.

But a heatwave in Australia is not a matter of overtime in the ice-cream industry: people die from heat-related stress or in bushfires, or in “fatal thunderstorm respiratory events”.

What the sneering about “Poms” overlooks is that Australia is by and large built to cope. Its major cities may be sprawling outwards but its older houses, at least, were built to circulate air and minimise heat retention. Air-conditioning is ubiquitous and reliable. The vast majority of Australians can not only swim but have ready access to water, be it at a swimming pool – many of which are outdoors, in parks – or the ocean.

By comparison, most Britons live in houses designed to trap heat at all costs, with – if they’re lucky – an old blow-up paddling pool in the garage. Then there are the trains and underground services, and the grubby feeling, a sort of spiritual death, that comes with pressing against strangers in 40C heat.

shirley greener (@motorhoming1) You buy something years ago and keep it in your garage “just in case “ and then one day it is very useful #UKheatwave pic.twitter.com/iqAWnU4SA6

The “no-nonsense experts from Down Under” – whom Janet Street-Porter suggests should be sent over to sort out the Met Office and the “baby mentality” it has “carefully nurtured” in Britons over the years – may arrive to find their work cut out for them.

London’s first heatwave this year, in April, was a cause for celebration. But now hot is becoming the new normal – and not just in the UK with devastating, deadly results – even those who seized the day when it first dawned sunny have tempered their enthusiasm to the hours before 10am and after 4pm. Work colleagues have started wishing each other “good luck out there” at the day’s end.

Yes, Britain is struggling this summer, but it’s not a sign of weakness – it’s a sign that we’re at the start of a process that many other, hotter countries are further along with. Put another way: we’re all frogs in the pan of water, but while Australia is closing in on 100C, Britain has only just noticed the stove is on.

How humans experience and respond to increasingly high temperatures and “the speed of perceived warming” is crucial if we are to adapt to a climate-challenged future, researchers have found.

Of course Australia has Britain beat on heat – but it’s a losing game for everyone. Some of us have just learned to cope better than others, as I said on the tube when a soggy bag of peas fell out from under my shirt.