And then out of the blue, the weather turned reasonable, verging on nice, flirting with idyllic … we got out of work semi-early … and killed a Guinness stout or three on the fifth-floor patio of a luxury hotel with a half-dozen people who all were interesting and had good stories to tell.

I’m going to quit complaining about the weather, certainly. This may be hell-on-Earth as a meterological concept for eight months of the year, but we’re not in those eight months right now.

The facts are that nobody in Abu Dhabi really spends any significant time talking about the weather. It is what it is. There are no surprises. It’s awful except for the four months or so that begin about the middle of November. Which is where we are now.

Normally, if you put eight Westerners on the patio of an Abu Dhabi luxury hotel with a nice, big swimming pool a few feet away … well, we’re all going into the pool just to try to get our core body temperatures down to 101 degrees or so. So the hallucinations will stop.

But the air temp was maybe 70, and the pool had to be hotter than that, so we just sat and killed pints and traded journalism stories and “can you believe this goes on here?” Abu Dhabi anecdotes. We may have solved some pressing questions relating to world peace or the merits of soccer vs. American football. Or not.

But no one is complaining about the weather. And people here don’t, really, even when it is (and this is no exaggeration) hot enough to kill people. Like Death Valley in August.

You don’t go out and stand in the open here (most of the year) unless you have a big life insurance policy that you want one of your loved ones to collect on. This is beyond “mad dogs and Englishmen/noon-day sun” … it’s more like overtly suicidal because I’m an Oakland Raiders fan and I realize Al Davis is never going to die. Or “I’m a Dodgers fan and I just know one of the McCourts is going to end up with the team … but not have any money left after buying out their loathsome former spouse.”

Even then, weather doesn’t come up much here. What’s there to say, really? It’s unspeakably hot. OK. Got it. What else have you got?

Those of us who work indoors brave 10-15 minutes waiting for a cab, then the 30 seconds it takes to get inside the front door of the office … then the five minutes it takes to get a cab, at 10 p.m., when even in August it’s a not-immediately-lethal 95 degrees or so.

And that’s livable. If we were working construction outside for 12 hours a day … well, that would be different. But we don’t. And we scuttle from one artificially chilled environment to another, and the weather doesn’t impact our lives at all beyond the fact that nobody here has tans, despite all the sun, because you don’t lay out in this weather; you get out of it asap.

OK, there is one significant precaution you must keep in mind when it’s hot here. Well, any time of the year here …

Anything edible that can melt … has melted. Before you bought it. Ice cream. Frozen chicken strips. Chocolate. Just accept it. If you still like ice cream that has turned to the consistency of milk before being refrozen … then go ahead and buy. If you don’t mind M&Ms in the shape of mini footballs or chocolate cookies that stick together … well, buy those McVittie Digestibles with the milk choco on one side. They will stick together like frat brothers in a fist fight, but if you’re OK with that, here’s what you do: Eat ’em with a fork.

So, what did we learn tonight, on the fifth-floor patio of the luxury hotel?

Dick Turpin is England’s most famous highwayman. The trouble with American football is all the interruptions in play. The Birmingham accent is the worst in England. And maybe some other things, but those are the ones that come to mind just now. Spinney’s (a local upscale market) will cook turkeys for Thanksgiving.

So, yes, on the whole, a night well-spent.