In this desert heat, I have a dose of weather sickness
IS THERE such a feeling as weather sick? I don’t mean catching a chill from a dousing in the rain but being far removed from one’s familiar climate and experiencing a visceral longing.
Weather Watch arrives this week from the shores of Lake Chad, which has diminished by a staggering 95 per cent in half a century – largely as a result of climate change, but also due to population growth and illconsidered irrigation.
The sun in this arid desert region is ferocious – and getting hotter in recent decades. Last week, it apparently reached 122F (50C). This week, it has surpassed 104F (40C). The heat is so intense that the lake can evaporate at a rate of 1.2in (3cm) a day.
I realise my desert woes will elicit little sympathy back home. After all, this weekend in Britain is predicted to be unsettled, cold, wet and windy. On Sunday, there is even a suggestion of snow in the North. If there is, I shall feel oddly cheated to be missing out on the final throes of a British winter.
Perhaps it was a bout of weather sickness that finally drew the Yorkshire artist David Hockney back from his exile under the fixed azure canopy of the Los Angeles sky.
His latter work revels in the English seasons – the arrival of spring through to the slow sepia fades of autumn in the Yorkshire Wolds. For those in need of some colour to drag them through the dreary days of March, a Hockney exhibition is on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Ice Cold in Alex, the 1958 film, follows a medical field unit evacuated from their North African outpost as they trek across the Sahara Desert back to Alexandria. Haggard and dusty, as they march they dream of the ice cold beer they will drink on arrival.
Good as that sounds, when I do finally make it out of the desert a good dose of English drizzle will suffice.