Has the heatwave turned you into a hot head?
You were waiting for months for summer to arrive – now it has and you’ve got heat rage. You’re not alone, says Guy Kelly
Things are getting serious. Train tracks are wilting like Victorian maidens. Half of Lancashire has been flambéed. The BBC is about a week away from just pressing play on a prerecorded clip of Tomasz Schafernaker in a string vest, sighing, and saying, “bloody ditto, folks” in front of his tangerine-coloured UK map, rather than making a new forecast every night. We’ve even been warned about a possible broccoli shortage, for heaven’s sake!
It has been clement around the country for a fortnight or so. It feels like we are now at the 4,291st day of the Great Heatwave of 2018 – and it is beginning to have a profound effect on people, places and things.
It wasn’t always like this: when the warm weather started, decades ago, the nation was united in gratitude. A lovely bit of sun, we said. How quaint. Fast-forward however long it’s been – it’s too hot to even check what our agreed guesstimate was – and we are no longer homogeneous in our attitude to the sun. We are now a country divided into tribes, as our usual, measured British characters melt away and reveal a layer even our closest family might never have seen: our heatwave personality.
You might be loving it. You might have gone a bit doolally. Or you might be in Surrey, defiling the purity of your village by sunbathing topless in your garden, forcing your innocent neighbours to spy on you from an upstairs window for a while, before they call the police.
Frankly, we ought to be giving you a medal simply for mustering the strength to reach page 19 of today’s Telegraph – in these temperatures, it must feel like heaving to the index of an Argos catalogue – but instead we’ll offer you diagnoses. So, what’s your heatwave personality? If it’s none of them, perhaps ask your spouse…
The bi-solar crowd
This is the most common reaction to the heatwave from middle-aged and retired men. They wait all winter for the sun to arrive, shaking their fists at ground frosts, optimistically refusing to turn the heating on after January 15, because “it ought to warm up any day now”, and moaning at every grey sky from April. Now the sun is here, they’ve about-turned. “The grass is ruined, the beds are dying, when will this all end?” they mutter, watering their precious, arid lawn – a 15m x 20m rectangle that’s had more love and affection than any of their children – for the sixth time that day, because they just never know when a hosepipe ban might be enforced.
The summer crammers
Not unreasonably, they drew from their experience of British summers past and assumed the good weather would last for four or five days, at best. As a consequence, they bingesummered: they’ve been to the beach, swum in the lido, picnicked in the park, eaten Calippos for breakfast, lunch and dinner, drunk more rosé than is advised in a lifetime, stood on the pavement outside pubs every night for the past two weeks, and haven’t had a dinner that’s not been mostly charcoal since before Lent. How do hot countries not get bored? Bring on Christmas.
The dog-days deniers
Even Australian newspapers have reported on us with envy, as Canberra shivered in -5C. It wouldn’t be Britain without a few naysayers, though, and if you haven’t come across them, it may be you: the kind of people who that it is, in fact, not hot.
Invariably, they have spent time in a traditionally very hot country, and thus feel qualified to dismiss our heatwave as nothing more than a blip, ridiculing both our inability to cope and our hysterical discussions on the topic. Said people will keep dressing in much the same way as they do in winter – even if they can be spotted dabbing their brow when they think nobody’s looking.
“You should try living near the Nile, which I did for a few heady weeks in the Eighties,” they might say. “Now that was real heat…”
The smug staycationers
There was a time, long before the heatwave, when these people were bitter and jealous about their friends’ summer holiday plans. Kenya? How fascinating. Spain in July? Busy, but lovely. Honolulu? You lucky things.
Today, staycationers are reading the “world readings” list on the back of the newspaper incandescent with smugness. The West Country tops them all on the mercury scale. As such, any time not cross-checking those temperatures is spent taking selfies with the campsite thermometer, to Whatsapp over to said friends, with the message: “Hotter here! Would you believe it! Who needs to spend £2,000 on a package deal to Portugal, when we are browning up a treat in Bognor?! :)”
The haters
They would be happy for a weekend’s worth of blazing sun all year, at most, but even that is pushing it. They do not own a pair of shorts, because that would be giving in and selling out, not to mention off-brand. They count down the days to October, because it means winter is coming. They’ve attended “Christmas in July” trade shows, just to see some fake snow and drink mulled wine. They look longingly at their coats. When they do go outside, if they do go outside, they like to gently inform people that they’re “a bit sick of the heat now, to be honest” – as if it wasn’t obvious. These are my people.