The heat is on and I just can’t cope

IN the summertime when I was a teenager my mother’s abiding cant was “Oh Jesus, I can’t stick the heat”. Now as everyone knows we had amazing summers in Ireland back in the day. Not a cloud in the sky. Her heat aversion drove me mad. She used to feign weakness and was only just short of begging for smelling salts.

In those days I plastered butter on my body and threw myself under the sun for as many hours as it took to roast my body to a cinder. Now I’m way worse than her. The heat is getting to me. I’m cranky and vicious.

On a recent trip to Italy I actually thought my demise was imminent. The sweat was permanently flowing in rivulets down between my once-pert now pendulous breasts. And I mean flowing. There were wet stains under my arms and a purple hue to my face. My hands and ankles started to swell. A big bulge hung out between jeans and sandals. It wasn’t a good look.

And as for my hair. It began to resemble hair from other parts of the anatomy. And the heat affected the dye and my hair turned yellow and I morphed very rapidly into somebody most definitely from the wrong side of town. My energy levels, which aren’t the best anyway, became alarmingly low, and I would have been happy to crawl along on all fours. I couldn’t sleep at night and reverted to my younger days of gay abandon and sleeping in the nip. As you get older this is not a good idea just in case of an emergency like a fire or something in the middle of the night.

So the picture is an older woman with a purple face, yellow pubic hair on her head, a swollen frame with wet patches — confirming the view to other nations that the Irish do not do well in the heat.