Ok, it’s hot. But what a glorious diversion from all our woes
FOR almost everybody in Britain, it is one of those weeks when the most delicious sight is that of cool water, the most delicious sound a splash.
Postmen are wearing shorts, roads are melting. Unions demand that some workers should be allowed to go home. Every woman looks pretty, and it would be worth paying generously to persuade some men to put their clothes back on.
The country is basking in a heatwave allegedly longer than we have experienced for 20 years, and the phenomenon is proving divisive. Few heavy people enjoy it, nor do schoolchildren who have difficulty staying awake in classrooms, never mind learning anything. Commuter trains prompt comparison with that hot place run by a man with horns and a toasting fork.
Cricketers and tennis players complain that it is okay for those of us who just watch them, but no fun at all being out there on the pitch or court. Guardsmen dread roasting outside Buckingham Palace. We should sympathise with policemen obliged to wear body armour, and with most zoo animals.
My wife Penny refuses to ride her pony, saying it is cruel to make a horse do more than flick its tail at the flies until the sun goes down. Dogs hug the shade and look uncharacteristically resentful about coming for walks. Anybody working indoors anywhere without air conditioning wants to be somewhere else.
People who have paid through the nose for early Mediterranean holidays feel silly, because they could enjoy all the same sensations at home, without the rows with Germans about towels.
The rest of us love it. Penny keeps trying to stop me bicycling on grounds of decrepitude, but on a day like yesterday in London, it was a joy to pedal through the streets, gazing at crowds spilling out of pubs across the street, restaurant customers fighting for outdoor tables.
Topless cars, a waste of time for everyone over 30 for 11 months of the year, suddenly seem infinitely desirable. How one yearns to be driving a green MG with the hood down again — though I discovered half a century ago that it does less than I had hoped to increase one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex.
Summer drinks suddenly become madly interesting: from elderflower cordial to iced rosé and Pimm’s, from lager with frost on the glass to that choice French aperitif, kir.
YOU
have not tried kir? White wine with a touch of cassis, named for a priest called Pere Kir.
I was introduced to it by an exuberant war hero named Jacques Poirier, who exclaimed: ‘We are going to talk about the Resistance, so we must drink the drink of Resistance!’ So we did, and ever since I mop up kir on sultry days like these.
I am seldom nostalgic about the distant past, because the present and future have so much to offer. Nonetheless, when the sun shines most of us get excited about rivers, dreaming of The Wind In The Willows, or poling a punt on the Cherwell — the only thing I learned to do well at Oxford.
Ratty, you will remember, said nothing can beat messing around in boats, and who could disagree as one gazes at a river’s cool sparkle? Fishing becomes a delight at evening as the sun vanishes and fish plop about on the surface snatching at flies — with luck, including one’s own.
I was a little disingenuous above, mentioning the fun one can have in cities in a heatwave, as in truth there is nothing to beat being on a beach, especially in Devon or Cornwall, or in the countryside.
Penny claims to sob going west over the Hammersmith flyover, away from London, while I shed a tear coming the other way, into the asphalt and plate-glass jungle.
At this time of year, the landscape and trees around our home in Berkshire still have a wonderful freshness, which they will have lost by August. Our colours seem much richer than those of the parched yellow Mediterranean countries. Where else can you see grass to match ours before the sun has burned away the brightness?
My father, a passionate oldfashioned Englishman who expressed sympathy for lesser breeds of mankind such as Americans, once wrote: ‘Three things foreigners give us credit for are the greenness of our grass, the mettle of our horses and the beauty of our children.’ I have always been a trifle doubtful whether he was right about this, but on days like these I know what he meant.
For the past few days we have been harvesting and gathering in the garden, picking and shelling broad beans, watching pea pods fatten, stripping blackcurrant bushes, pigging out on strawberries and raspberries that no shopbought variety can match.
On Monday we sat under a Tuscan umbrella on the terrace eating only our produce, revelling in every mouthful.
I will not lie and pretend that the kitchen garden is an economy: Penny calculates that the labour makes every leek cost about five times as much as Tesco’s, ‘and the supermarket’s don’t have mud on them!’ No matter. We love the good life, and a June like this has brought every bloom and berry as near perfection as they will ever get on our watch.
Evenings become especially important if there is physical work to be done: nobody wants to dig and haul, or even climb ladders to tie up roses, when the landscape swims and shimmers amid the midday haze.
We all feel sorry for those doing daytime hard labour without the option, sweating up ladders or down holes to make their living. Just this once, maybe the unions have a point about letting them off for a day or two.
One of the ironies of heatwaves like this is that through those dreary, rain- streaked winter months we sit at home longing to feel sun on our faces, to gaze at fluttering bushes of lavender and vivid dashes of colour in our rosebeds. Yet when the heat finally arrives, we burn bright red and gripe that we cannot sleep in our oven-like bedrooms.
But that is what makes us British — for we will always find something disobliging to say about the weather.
It is a blessed relief that in the country, at least, the walls of our old house are so thick the heat seems unable to pierce them. Years ago, we put a balcony on our bedroom, so we can throw open the French doors and lie in bed gazing at trees, the cloudless blue sky above, the garden beneath.
MOMENTS like this make it possible for some of us, for a brief season, to banish thoughts about the crueller, scarier world we inhabit most of the time.
A hatful of hot days solves none of the issues and challenges facing Britain. But this designer weather confers a touch of romance and beauty, a sort of natural luxuriousness for which we may be thankful.
By the weekend, temperatures are supposed to resume normal service: evening sweaters will be back in fashion; trout should stop complaining about oxygen deprivation; farmers and gardeners will soon be pleading for rain — you know, the wet stuff that makes Britain what it is.
But just for now, let us count our blessings, as distributed by God rather than by any politician. We do not want a heatwave every day, nor even every month. But it has been a jolly nice surprise, at a time when the British people needed, and maybe even deserved, one.