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?
6 comments:
Mike, I'm in Chandigarh and the max temps have been hovering around the 42~44 mark.
Air conditioning is the only answer.
OMG, Pritam, that's insane... I believe a "wet bulb" temperature (heat + humidity measure) of anything over 35 C is reckoned to be "unendurable", leading pretty quickly to heat stroke. I presume further south it just gets worse?
Mike
Even in the UK East Midlands it's been scorching hot for the past week or so. Severn Trent is our particular branch of the disgraceful UK water industry and pretty much identical to Southern Water save for a couple of pounds per month, perhaps. A very positive trade off, though, was the magnificent thunderstorm we had in the early hours of Thursday morning. I love a good thunderstorm and this was by far the most dramatic one I've ever experienced - even better than the one we passed through on a short haul European flight in the 1960s.
In the face of Trump, Blair, Milburn, Sturgeon in Scotland and Donaldson in Ireland and all the other disgraceful scalliwags, I find myself in a Voltairean period of life - I am cultivating the garden, mulching and watering from butts (of course) and recycling (including food waste) and re-using like there's (almost) no tomorrow.
It's the three-parter for me - the careful preparation, the take off and then the ascent. Apologies to corvus but the three parter also brings to mind Wallace Stevens' Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. Sublime.
Thanks, DM. Ah, yes, thunderstorms! My mother, who had been the sergeant on a heavy ack-ack battery during the war, was terrified of it -- hilariously ironic, we thought, but today would be recognised as a form of PTSD...
The only poem I have memorised in Russian is Anna Akhmatova's "You Will Hear Thunder" ("You will hear thunder and remember me / And think: she wanted storms").
Mike
The diptych is lovely. That's really nice, Mike.
Thanks, Paul! It's obviously effective -- much cooler today...
Mike
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