Worse than '76

Jesus Christ it’s hot. Man alive it’s so fucking hot. It’s hard to add too much more than that, to be honest. We’re at about 32 degrees as the high for today, after the last 2 days also being above 30. It’s June! Not even the hot months.

I’m spending most of my time trying to find cool places. We open all our doors and windows when we wake up, then go round shutting everything up at about 9am and retreating into our rooms as hermits. Then come 9pm we dash round the house and open everywhere up again to try to drag the temperature back down.

I swear 30 degrees in the UK is so much warmer than 30 degrees elsewhere. Maybe it’s because we’ve still got stuff to do and so can’t lounge about with a cocktail (I cycled to and from school today!). Maybe it’s because our houses are all designed to trap heat. Reception class has been shut because they don’t have air conditioning. Taekwondo has been cancelled. Our cleaner cancelled.

The baby is sleeping in a 31 degree room in just his nappy and I’m frantically looking at how I can get air conditioning set up.

Perhaps the only saving grace (aside from the thunderstorm this morning) is the fact that we’ve smashed the heat records from 1976 and so we can now safely put to bed the old ‘you think this was bad…you weren’t there in 1976’.

I actually have a fun story from that summer (even though I wasn’t even nearly born). I can always work out which summer it was because my dad told me that he nearly missed one of his O-level exams because he was sunbathing because it was the hottest summer ever, when his teacher realised he wasn’t there. Fortunately, the teacher lived nextdoor to my dad and so phoned his wife and said to shout over the garden fence and tell my dad to get to school pronto.

Worryingly, this doesn’t look like it’s going to be a once-in-50-years kind of weather phenomenon, and instead might end up being an every-year or every-few-years kind of thing going forward. Maybe that changes the maths on air conditioning and we’ll finally have to cave.

Probably depressing times for the planet. Though I suppose if we shouldn’t overreact to cold days and claim those as evidence of a lack of global warming, we probably shouldn’t overreact to hot periods either.

Anyway, this isn’t a global warming sort of post. I’m just really really hot.