Apparently, in the heatwave, Blackpool Victoria Hospital propped its doors open to keep cool… and was subsequently overrun with seagulls.
We must be such an amusing country. I mean other places have had this stuff figured out for a long time. Here in the UK, temperatures in the mid 30s, or even in the mid minus 30s are actual front page news.
Mind you, there are other things we’ve got really quite sorted in our long, temperate history; things like constitutional democracy, the principle of the rule of law, tolerance of difference, and of course, how to make a jolly good cup of tea.
Well you know, mostly, anyway.
I read somewhere that in a heatwave you should copy what they do in Middle Eastern countries and dress in robes. I don’t have any robes so I thought about fashioning a sheet into a toga. Then I remembered that at some point, my wife will come home, and I don’t need to give her another thing to worry about.
Meanwhile, the runways are melting, Chester Zoo are giving their animals ice creams, and the Queen’s Guards outside Buckingham Palace still had to wear their bearskin hats and be watered by police officers.
It got to 36°C here yesterday, and if anything, today feels like it might get hotter, just as they predicted. How in the world did Britain ever conquer all those hot places? We dressed in red, sweated our way across the globe and boiled ourselves in our tea-tents. It must have been like seeing clowns scrabbling over the desert - with muskets and cannons. Sometimes I think we should just have stayed at home.
Well. It’s before 9am and it’s already 29. Yesterday afternoon I had to turn off the fans for a meeting and I was cooking like a turkey within minutes.
Our only consolation is that this, we think, will be the last day of it. If not, I am definitely fashioning that toga.
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