Heat

I am hot. And not just in the Diet Coke sense, ladies, oh yes. It has been, apparently, the hottest day of the year so far. In fact, the Met Office will go further, it has been the hottest day in Britain ever. A whole 39C. That's a lot of centigrade for us, but perhaps we need some perspective on this. What is the effect of this unprecedented heat wave? How are we dealing with it? And most importantly, why is it so bastard hot in the first place?

One if the immediate effects is the annual appearence of the Bikini Three. Every time the sun comes out, the Sun sends photographers to Brighton and Bournemouth to find some girls in skimpy swimwear. We are then treated to a picture of them stood arms loosely around eachother's waists, their left hips relaxed into a luxurious and unselfconsciously seductive pose. Perhaps later they will run lotion into each other's glowing bodies, feeling the liberating effects of the heat as they loosen their bikini straps and their inhibitions with them.

I am sorry to bring ersatz fantasy lesbianism into the mix so early, but it really is a regular thing. There is, on the BBC News website, a picture of three bikini'd lovelies cooling their tootsies in the Diana Fountain in Hyde Park. Why this is neccessary to illustrate an article that is stating the extremely obvious - it is hot and people are going to the seaside - I don't know. I grew up by the sea. 99 percent of Britain's beaches are either flint, stone or shingle. A bikini is not idea clotihng for this, as some of the briefer examples as worn by the Bikini Three can lead to sand entering places you don't want sand to be. Most people at the beach wear sturdy swimsuits. Also, most people don't look like models shipped in especially to pose on Brighton Beach.

The other tale regularly told is that of Commuter Chaos. Commuting is uncomfortable at the best of times, and in the UK years and years of cheapskatery regarding trasnportation is now firmly home to roost. The trains, crap to begin with, are now being cancelled nationwide because it is too hot. The rails are buckling in the sun. Given that it the rails regularly become brittle in the cold we are now left wondering if there is any weather where the trains will run at all. And that's just the rails. If you have the good fortune to find a train that is working, it is a fair bet that the air conditioning will not be, if there is aircon at all. The London Underground is having to provide free cool drinks to stop people fainting on the platforms.

Given all this, perhaps we might decide to drive, but no, the roads are melting as well. Bits of the M25 and M1 have been shut because the surface has been sticking to lorry tyres and leaving holes. And we won't get far anyway because the queues to the beach are a thousand cars long, all keen to get a glimpse of the bikini clad lovelies the papers reliably tell us are there.

And this is only Wednesday. I will admit, the pictures of the office workers dancing in the fountains in Trafalgar Square do look fun - I did it once a couple of years back, and it was great. But really all it does is encourage fat men to take off their shirts. I haven't been outside without a shirt on since I was about eight years old. And we will get the ever cheery weatherman telling us that this "glorious" weather will continue for the next week when we will "sadly" see some showers.

By the weekend, of course, the guilt will have settled in. We will see anguished debates on Newsnight and in the Independent about how this freak heat, which has happened every summer as far back as I can remember, is due to global warming and should we consider nuclear power, lacking as it does the nasty carbon dioxide that will kill us all? There will be tales of how people are dying in their homes from exhaustion and sunstroke, and dire warnings of skin cancer if you step outside for more than a few seconds.

Bear in mind that I am anti-nuclear, well aware of the problems of climate change and depleted ozone. But it is the same every year - it gets hot in the summer and we are surprised. It's like snow - it snows in the winter and we are surprised. Every summer is the hottest on record now, every winter the coldest, and despite the experience of having last year's doom-laden warnings utterly fail to come about, we still seem to think that the world is about to end if it stays above 20C for three days in the week.

I think we just like to complain. It was 50C in Kuwait City today, and 40C in Denver. That's hot. That's surprisingly hot. And for a nation with so much weather, we seem utterly unable to cope with it. It can rain, shine, hail and fog here in the space of an hour. We are used to that. And of course, there was a time when temperatures of 20C would make the news. Bill Bryson once quoted a newspaper from 1977 which carried the headine "BRITAIN SIZZLES IN THE SEVENTIES" That's about 19 centigrade.

Well. Yest again in the course of my attempt at a dialectic on the weather and what it may say about British culture, I have managed to contradict myself just before the end. The inane spiel of the weatherman makes me think that the reason we are so affected by the heat is that we are constantly expecting it to end, whereas the Spanish, whose weather is less exciting in that it is generally hotter and drier, expect only to be hot between May and September. Besides, they are too busy dealing with the regular fires that burn down most of Europe's trees every August. And they have bikinis on the news, man. That's living.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal