Weeknotes #383 — I’m hot just like an oven

A swan and their cygnets on the bank of the River Bulbourne by The Old Mill, Berkhamsted. Boiling. In the UK we are not equipped to live through day after day of mid-30s°C heat, with the temperature only dropping into the mid-20s overnight with barely a breeze in the air. Sleeping was a tough gig, lying on top of our bed with a fan trying its best to help us get some rest. You wake up hot and dehydrated, lusting after a shower set to a cold temperature that you previously could never have imagined being brave enough to use. It’s been many years since I read George Orwell’s Burmese Days but I do remember it describing how oppressive the heat felt: They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and…