Life and times

The author on air-conditioning, a not-so-hot show – and the World’s Tallest Thermometer

Author Patrick Ness

I’VE JUST RETURNED from two weeks in Los Angeles. When people ask the main differences between living in the US and living in the UK, I always say, ‘Junk food and interior climate control.’

It was 43C in Los Angeles, and I was comfortable everywhere I went. It’s 26C in London today, and I’m a sweating mess because of the lack of decent air-conditioning. Every time I mention this to a British person, they say the same thing: ‘But it doesn’t get hot here often enough to make it worth it.’ Except every single year, Britain.

While in America, I visited my niece in Las Vegas, another luxuriously air-conditioned city. I took her to Cirque du Soleil’s Ka. I’d never seen a Cirque du Soleil show before, so didn’t quite know what to expect. There was, apparently, a plot, but I doubt anyone in the auditorium could coherently tell you what it might have been. But there were also lots of genuinely amazing aerials and acrobatics… Until the finale, when there was a technical malfunction.

We sat for at least seven uncomfortable minutes while the poor acrobats just hung there motionless as the music thundered on. I was overcome with vicarious, cringing pity for them. I’m always like that. I can’t even watch shows where the characters get embarrassed. I call it ‘useless runaway empathy,’ where I feel so bad for fictional characters that I have to turn the programme off. I’ve never made it to the end of an episode of The Office.

THE DRIVE TO VEGAS from Los Angeles is four hours through the quite breathtaking high California desert. About halfway there, you pass through a town called Baker, home to – I kid you not – the World’s Tallest Thermometer. It used to have an accompanying World’s Tallest Thermometer Restaurant, which was open 24 hours and sold World’s Tallest Thermometer Mugs...

How do I know this? Well, in 1999, just before I moved to the UK, my closest friends in Los Angeles and I decided on a last-minute road trip to Vegas. We hopped in the car on a Friday night and were on our way. Except we never arrived because at 1am, just outside Baker, there was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. We passed the World’s Tallest Thermometer and then stopped. It took three hours to drive the next two miles.

By that point, we’d been in the car for an eternity and had drunk all the soft drinks we’d brought along. The inevitable happened. We all desperately needed a toilet stop. But where? We were stuck in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a traffic jam. I said, ‘Just pull over. It’s the desert, who’s going to care?’ The three of us flung open the car doors, ran into the empty desert, and made peace with our bladders.

What we did not take into account was that everyone else had also been sitting there for hours. They saw that we’d pulled over and suddenly the desert was stampeded by dozens of people, racing to find a cactus to pee behind.

We thought this was so funny that Vegas probably wasn’t going to top it. So we did a U-turn, went back to the World’s Tallest Thermometer, ate pancakes at the World’s Tallest Thermometer 24-hour restaurant, got World’s Tallest Thermometer Mugs and went home happy.

I like to think that a few weeks later, that square of the desert was in unseasonable bloom.

ON MONDAY, I went to a preview of A Monster Calls at the Old Vic, the stage adaptation of one of my books. I won’t go on about it, but they’ve done such a beautiful job I cried. As did the two strangers next to me. I’m a lucky man. A Monster Calls is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until 25 August; oldvictheatre.com

The desert was stampeded by dozens of people, racing to find a cactus to pee behind