I cling to this memory. It isn’t a fantasy. It happened.

In a country that always feels as if it is on the wrong side of the microwave door, I find myself indulging in this reverie.

The day I wore a sweater.

I remember it well. The first day of the 2011 Abu Dhabi Golf  Championship. It was the dead of winter and the break of day.

Golf events can be like that. Guys teeing off the moment they have enough light to see where their ball went, and I was sent out there to trail a local kid playing in the first or second group.

When I left the apartment, it was bitter cold. Maybe 65. Crazy cold. I may have slept in a sweatshirt. I was going to be walking around in this arctic chill, exposed to the elements, and I decided I needed … a sweater.

Yes, we have sweaters over here in the Gulf. Not so much to wear outside, but for those long stretches when we might be in a room where the air conditioning has been set on “stun”.

At The National, for example, my desk is directly below an AC vent, and more than occasionally I pull out the sweater in the bottom drawer to warm up. My hands often are quite cold, and I’ve long worried that someone who walks up and introduces himself, and offers his hand, must think I’m close to dead, as cold as my hand is, from the AC.

In this case, January of 2011 … our whole world was cold. Like, the out-of-doors world. I opened the door, and that blast of frigid air slapped me in the face. No way was it higher than 65 Fahrenheit.

I wore that sweater like a security blanket for at least an hour.

OK, by 7 a.m., I was chasing the local kid on the third or fourth hole, and wondering what the hell I was doing carrying a sweater around in the desert, the one I’d taken off a half-hour before, but still …

It was cold! It was! Here in the AUH!

That thought comforts me, here in the early September of 2012, as we slog through a particularly vicious UAE summer.

The National has a weather story in the paper that says, essentially: “unrelenting misery all week!”

Temperatures in the 100s with humidity of 60-plus percent.

When I got home at 8 tonight, it was “95, feels like 111.” This is under the cover of night, mind.

By September, we feel as if “depths of summer” is the only season in this country, because it’s been like this since May and will be like this in October, too.

And it helps, it really does, to remember that dark morning nearly two years ago when wearing a sweater, outside, and for more than an hour was a deliciously good idea.

Ahhh …