Tuesday 29 June 2010

Window shopping


Britain has been slowly baking over the past week. It is the sort of rare UK weather that leads tabloids to fill their pages with pictures of Beth, 19, a hairdresser from Brighton, in a bikini and up to her belly button in the Channel, while other newspapers will report on the true cost of sunburn to the NHS. Even Glastonbury festival has been sunny, which I am not very pleased about – once you have been and endured four days of sludge, slurry and downpours, you want others to suffer the same way.

The heat in London is oppressive. My flat, with its large Victorian bay windows, has transformed into a microwave oven and I have been cooking on full power for eight days. I am done. And I am too afraid to open any windows after hearing about a colleague’s daughter – a student doctor in West London. She went to bed and left her bedroom window open so she could nod off with a slight breeze, only to wake at 3am staring at a hulk of a man who had climbed through and was helping himself to her computer. What a toerag.

Being pale and Cumbrian, I am not built for this heat – although I do love the sun as long as I can sit around in it and do very little, except eat white chocolate Magnums and read magazines. The promises of a good wage and good weather were the main reasons I moved down south in the first place. The Lake District is by its nature wet, and Aberdeen, where I went to university, was so very Scottish you only got two hours of sunshine each day. But after five years in London and nearly ten down south, the grey skies of the north seem most appealing. And it would be lovely to open a window.

2 comments:

  1. I toast your heat with our heat. Stay cool.

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  2. It has been roasting in Scotland too, but as you say at least we can open the windows!

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