New Delhi, July 16 -- From behind a barrier near King's Cross station in London came a chorus of screams. Ahead of me, a mother pushing a child in a pram peered through the tiny gaps in the fence with apparent alarm. She needn't have worried. The scene unfolding was a group of schoolchildren who had discovered a series of water jets at pavement level and had decided to run between them fully clothed. It was an understandable response to finding an urban oasis amid 35deg Celsius temperature that day.

Earlier that week, an interview at Wimbledon I was doing was briefly disrupted by shrieks and then laughter. At the centre of it was the tournament's hawk, whose job is to scare away pigeons but had landed on the outstretched hands of a group...