It's been too hot. I can't sleep. My brain has melted: 35° C during the day and over 20° C at night (a so-called "tropical night") is not normal for May in these parts. It's not even very common in the height of a hot summer. Although I suspect – as with Trump, Blair's latest undead intervention (witch project?), and, it seems, pretty much everything else going on in the world – what counts as "normal" has become a contested and unstable category.
So here's a three-parter picture I've been working on, which may help to cool things down a bit. Although, like those Xmas cards with Victorian carollers lantern-lit among the snow-drifts, it's a complete fantasy: snow is no longer "normal" around here either.
But if there's one thing guaranteed to bring my brain back up to boiling point, it's vox pop pieces from people out in the sun working on their skin lesions, spouting nonsense like, "Lovely bit o' sunshine! If this is climate change, bring it on!" I sincerely hope these fools get to live in a part of the country where the water supply has broken down, blamed by the utilities not on their decades of privatised corporate greed and neglect, but on "extra demand" by the public, due to the hot weather. You and your daily showers! [1] So, as always, it seems it's all our fault plus that of "the weather", and never their incompetence and short-sighted focus on extracting maximum profit from a monopoly situation. That, at least, is perfectly normal. I mean, why would a water company be expected to plan for extra demand in hot weather? Totally unreasonable!
Actually, on second thoughts, I think I prefer this picture cut down into a two-parter: much chillier! Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow... The ways things are going, it could happen. Maybe next week?
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