Tag: heatwave

385: the burning issue

There’s a lot of fires going on at the moment, thanks to a combination of the insanely hot, dry weather and – well – idiots. We were in a delightful pub up Caerphilly mountain on Friday night when the alerts started to roll in on people’s phones, shattering the relative quiet of happy diners with shrill beeps as the various networks rolled them out. Once we’d all worked out what was going on it became a shared moment of ‘oh ho, there we go again’. For the avoidance of doubt, ours arrived in Welsh and English at the same time.

This is what the live wildfire map of the area looks like at my time of writing:

That’s a lot of fires, gang. We’re just outside Caerphilly and the air is thick with a smoky haze generated by the many fires around us. Four teenage boys were arrested on suspicion of arson quite locally yesterday, accused of starting several fires in the area. The landscape is dry, dry, dry and – as the current prime minister (are we still on Andy Burnham? I forget…) would have it – is a tinderbox.

So, naturally, the news today was dominated by people complaining about the alerts – were they necessary? Why were they in Welsh first when not everyone speaks Welsh? Why didn’t they go as far as telling people about the danger of broken glass? (admittedly this one was an outlier on the outrage scale).

Why was this important enough to use the national alert system, despite the fact that it had been requested by the severely overworked emergency services, who are already being supplemented by the military in some areas because they are swamped. Houses have been burned. Swathes of the countryside have been razed. People have been made homeless. We are low on water, which is pretty damned important for putting the fires out.

Many people are already looking at the landscape and thinking how dry it is, and how barbecues might be a bit unwise. Others might think, as a result of the alert, that maybe they won’t have that teeny firework display tonight even if it is little Chardonnay’s first birthday because, you know, fire.

Others – like the absolute bloody idiot we were driving behind today – are still flicking their fag ends out of the truck window. Given their business phone number painted on the side was a mobile, I assume they received the alert last night like everyone else.

And that, my friends, is why we needed the warning.

Things making me happy this week:

  • Watching the eclipse with Miriam and the kids as mine weren’t interested. We are not very good with colanders.
  • 97 people of various sizes attending our family activities on Wednesday despite the heat – this week we read Rod Campbell’s Dear Zoo and made up their own prospective pets to send back. The snail who was too slimy, the penguin who was too slippery and the hedgehog who was too spiky were my favourites. Wednesdays are my favourite days
  • Ricky Gervais’s After Life which I watched in full this week. I’m not a fan of the man but this is amazing.
  • Starting the shawl I decided I needed to make last week

We’re also looking forward to a couple of slightly cooler days, if not to the rain we so desperately need. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to shake my fist at the clouds and do a rain dance.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Modern Fairies – Clare Pollard

The Witch’s Stone – Kirsty Ferry

Curious Physiologies – Jay Neill

Made in Scotland – Billy Connolly

A Court of Wings and Ruin – Sarah J. Maas (Audible)

383: weather continues…

…hot. Weather continues hot, with all that entails: men thinking it’s appropriate to go shirtless on the Underground, for example. For the avoidance of doubt, it isn’t, and no one wants to see those tattoos. The annual competition for the hottest underground line. Co-ops all over the country decorated with ‘this fridge is broken’ signs. Airconditioning units sold out. Dust and pollution replacing pollen in the noses of everyone in the city. The daily checking of BBC Weather (other apps are available) chasing the rain which is always just a few more days away. Online articles with top tips on how to beat the heat, at varying costs depending on which paper is currently clickbaiting you.

So, in the spirit of the season, here are my top tips for not going completely mad in the ongoing heatwave:

  • Lucozade Ice Kick on the train to hydrate. Two for £3 in the co-op at Farringdon (their fridges are working) bought just before you get on the train
  • Keep a stash of water bottles in your freezer. Not to drink, but to wrap in tea towels and take to bed at night.
  • Calippos. At least one a day, orange for preference but strawberry is nice too.
  • Carry an old fashioned fan and while away your horrible journey imagining you’re in Bridgerton. These are apparently very big on the fashion show front rows at the moment. This may be the only time I’ve been ahead of the trend, as I’ve had them in my handbag for years
  • Water sprays and an electric fan at night. Spray yourself, not the fan. This is important.
  • Consider alternative routes home if the tube is rammed. Think of it as an adventure. The overground lines are airconditioned.
  • Think seriously about moving to a polar region.
  • Cool showers before bed, but not cold.
  • Soak a tea towel in cold water and drape it round your neck (or over your entire body, but you’d need a bigger towel) and lie in a dark room. Science, apparently. Evaporation. Whatever.
  • Try not to touch a single other person with any part of your body.
  • Glare intensely at anyone who suggests holding meetings outside.
  • Listen to summer music and put ice in everything

Good luck!

Things making me happy this week

  • Crocheting ridiculous things – floppy cats and guinea pigs in varying sizes. Chenille yarn is so squishy.
  • Finally getting to deliver the Little Owls storytime at work – The Tiger Who Came to Tea this week – and planning next week’s activity
  • Walking through the fields with a very well-behaved Dobby, who didn’t bark at anything for a change
  • Not the local bus services
  • A solo mooch round Brentwood on Monday, trawling the charity shops
  • Helping Thing 2 apply for apprenticeships
  • Rewatching The Commitments and introducing Thing 2 to this gem, after the sad loss of Glen Hansard this week (and Sam Neill and Bill Oddie in July as well – enough, 2026, enough!). Go and watch Once if you haven’t seen it again…

What I’ve been reading

Everything Will Swallow You – Tom Cox

The Rainshadow Orphans – Naomi Ishiguro

The Woman in the Seal Skin – Lauren Keegan

A Court of Mist and Fury – Sarah J. Maas (Audible)

275: A-team, eat your heart out

A grey cat lying on paving slabs with some strawberry plants

I’m writing this sitting in the garden shelter in my bathers late Saturday morning. I am writing it now so I can schedule it for tomorrow morning as I may have melted in the 33 degree heat predicted for this afternoon. It’s been getting steadily hotter all week, and the garden shelter has become my office on my WFH days which has been a blessing as the house has been baking. Bailey’s chosen sleeping spot this week has been plastered against the north east corner wall where it’s cool as the sun never gets into it. Lulu, on the other hand, keeps lying in the sweltering conservatory and looking at me accusingly although there is a perfectly good hard floor in the kitchen she’d be cooler on. She’s not allowed out unsupervised as she swears at Ziggy and last week made it into the neighbour’s garden. Ted is making his displeasure known through the medium of loud miaows.

The shelter was formerly known as ‘under the treehouse’, before the kids stopped using the treehouse because of the spiders and my Beloved cut down the tree because it (a planted Christmas tree from his childhood which had grown enormous) was blocking the solar panels. It’s been one of those projects that, in the words of designerly types, just kept iterating.

The original plan was a small crows nest that the kids could climb up to, but then they got involved and it was big enough to have a small picnic table, some shelves, a crows nest rigged from an old Ercol chair, rigging and a roof. It was bigger than my kitchen. Then Thing 1 and her dad designed a seat underneath made from an old wooden bed frame, and gradually one of the sides got enclosed. The deck underneath it was extended to the edge of where the strawberries and fruit trees live in the winter and the pool in the summer.

The original treehouse with Thing 2 in the crows nest

When the original tree and treehouse came down the platform stayed, although he raised it a foot or so. A green roof was installed with succulents to attract wildlife. Then last year one of our neighbours, who knows of my Beloved’s penchant for recycling, brought over a conservatory which was being removed from a posh house refurb. The doors and windows have been fitted to the shelter so we can sit surrounded by greenery but sheltered from the weather. It’s got quite a nice half-timbered effect at the back and cladding on the corner now too.

The view from my ‘home office’
Inside view
The garden shelter

This year, he’s added a slanting roof to the front to replace the sailcloth canopies we’ve had in previous summers as they’re never square and always collect rain in a dip in the middle. My role was to remove the plastic protection from the powder coated panels before they went up, and occasionally to have an opinion (something I am quite good at, unlike DIY). Last weekend we rigged a sailcloth along the front for shade for the babies during the Father’s Day BBQ and this has now become a cunningly rolled curtain. I confidently expect to come back one day and find out that it’s been extended to meet the house so the furry thugs can access it via a Great Escape style tunnel from their catio. (He’s just informed me that he’s bought some coolpads for the cats, so this isn’t too much of a stretch.)

I came home from work yesterday and it was full of teenagers celebrating the of their GCSEs with a sleepover (9 of them!) and today it’ll be full of family which is always lovely. I love having a houseful, especially if I am not required to feed them.

Other things making me happy this week

  • Evidence that the fox is still on site at New River Head, having a good explore of the new concrete floors
  • Calippos
  • Getting all the schools booked in for piloting the new school sessions – and remembering just why I used to appreciate Brian and the box office at times like this. Eight days of delivery, eight different schools, three facilitators and one me….
  • Surviving Thing 2’s GCSEs. Two down, one to go…
  • Tom Hiddleston dancing. I am shallow.
  • The day I came home from work and the ice cream van arrived at the same time, followed by a dip in the pool
  • Air con in the office
  • Finishing Thing 2’s prom skirt – and she loves it, luckily. She’s going to look beautiful (of course) but also unique as she’s brave enough to make her own fashion choices.
  • A Solstice swim on Saturday evening – the lake was 27.4 degrees this week
  • Picnic food. I’m on catering strike.
  • Making a sensible decision not to train this weekend

/

This week I’m going to be 52 (how???) and I am planning on going somewhere nice for dinner, especially if this heatwave continues.

Same time, same place next week, unless I have MELTED.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Shadowlands – Matthew Green

City of Ghosts/The Dream Thief/Dark Waters – Violet Fenn

La Vie – John Lewis-Stempel

Vianne – Joanne Harris

Greetings from Bury Park – Sarfraz Manzoor (Audible)

122: hot enough for you?

Hot, isn’t it.

Properly, officially hot.

Hot enough for the gritters to be out sanding the roads in case they melt, for TfL to be emailing me and telling me not to get on trains, and for the denizens of the internet to be complaining not about the heat but about the latest version of the weather map. It’s far too scary, apparently.

Michael Fish, not being scary.

In the ‘olden days’ (ie when the likes of Michael Fish and Wincey Willis were slapping velcro-backed sunshine and clouds onto the map and suggesting we took a cardigan) weather was a happy thing and it was called ‘summer’. Now – with clever computer graphics which show temperatures and snow and things without the need for double-sided sticky tape, weather maps are designed to bring FEAR and TERROR and QUITE POSSIBLY parties of irritating Hobbits chucking bling into what’s being referred to as ‘the A1 corridor’.

Mordor. Sorry, the weather map for this week.

You can almost predict what’s coming next: mutterings about 1976 and how that was a heatwave, Britain did proper heatwaves back then, droughts, reservoirs drying up, plagues of ladybirds, shortage of Mivvis, that sort of thing. It’s like a badly scripted sitcom, with lines spoken by a hanky-headed, string-vest wearing pensioner in a deckchair. Well yes, it was indeed all those things, though I may have made up the Mivvi shortage – for two whole months – but crucially the maximum temperature reached was 35.9 degrees. This is a good four degrees lower than the potential highs this week which are likely to be record breaking. The first red warning for heat has been issued – they did only invent them last year, to be fair – with a risk to life for even healthy people. Significant changes to daily routines are being advised, with damage to infrastructure possible (railway tracks in London were on fire last week, for a start). Schools are considering closing.

So SHUT UP about 1976: since then we’ve developed a bloody great hole in the ozone layer, the ice shelves are melting, the sea is rising and global temperature has risen about 1.1 degree since 1880 with the majority of the warming occurring since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20°C per decade. Nine of the ten hottest years on record have been in the the last decade, and 1976 doesn’t even feature in the list. Get used to the scary weather maps and maybe have a think about what you, as a citizen of the planet, could do to help: every little helps, as a famous supermarket would have it.

Things making me happy this week:

  • The pool and the lake
  • Watching Thing 3’s end of year performance
  • The portable air cooler thingy in the bedroom
  • The chilled section in Tesco…
  • Thing 1’s 16th birthday – Now, 2006, that was a hot summer…Sorry.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay– Michael Chabon

Tales from the City – Armistead Maupin