It's Too Hot... Again

Every single year I think that it cannot possibly get as hot as it did the year before.

I delude myself into thinking the hot spell of the last year was a fluke accident, a flash in the pan that will simple never happen again.

But, lo and behold, Spring comes around and the heat begins to ramp up. It starts slowly at first, with the odd hot day here and there, just to remind you what’s on the way. Then, suddenly, there will be a morning where you wake up and it’s as though you’ve been transported - sometime during the night - into the very depths of Hell.

You’ll open your eyes, throw off the covers, and feel like you’re on a guided tour of the Underworld with your good pal Dante. It’s a specific type of Hell, perhaps another level, a secret one that young Dante didn’t include in his poem.

This Hell, it looks the same as your everyday life. All the locations are the same, all the people are the same, your friends and family all behave like they should (although perhaps a little bit more frazzled than normal), and you still have the same anxieties, worries, and stresses that you’ve always had.

The key difference, though — what separates this Hell from your everyday life — is that the place you find yourself in is absolutely fucking boiling.

You spend your time guzzling water by the gallon, drinking so much that you’ve begun to believe that you’re morphing into some half-fish, half-human hybrid. This fish creature is living the life of a regular person, but will soon sprout gills and seek out the closest body of water. On top of this, you walk around your flat with a fine film of sweat coating every inch of skin you have, and you begin to stink like the carcass of a pig that’s been left out in the sun.

There’s the lethargy, too. The heat makes you totally unbothered about everything. All you want to do is sleep. An insidious feeling, should you try to rouse in yourself the energy to care about anything, you’ll quickly realise your brain cannot focus on anything beyond the minute-to-minute survival of the heat that lingers in the air.

Perhaps you’ll get the notion to enjoy a gust of wind produced by the fan sat upon your desk. Switching that on, you’ll soon find that all it does is supercharge the hot, fetid air directly into your face. On the radio, crackling on the heat-thickened air, will be topical, afternoon chats where the chipper host will tell you the hot new trick of pointing your fan out of a window.

“It blows the hot air out,” the host will say, inflecting their voice just enough to piss you off beyond measure. Still, you’ll try what they say. Your anger will skyrocket when you discover the cable doesn’t reach the damn window and now you’re even more hot and sweaty from crawling around on the floor beneath your desk to unplug the damn thing.

You look on social media in an attempt to take your mind off the scorching heat that surrounds you on all sides. A few scrolls and you see news of a heatwave in Britain. Yeah, you think, tell me about it.

Some moron who’s never left their small town of Bumfucksville, Idaho will gleefully comment that British summers “don’t come close to a warm day out in Georgia, ya hear?” and you want to go mad. You want to reply to their comment, saying that well actually, good sir, British homes have been traditionally built for the colder climates so tend to lock the heat in, and if you’ll please read through the attached link, it will explain how humidity indeed does cause temperatures in Britain to feel much hotter than you may believe.

After about three seconds of typing all that, you soon realise you can’t be bothered. Slowly, your brain begins to fry as you delete your comment but read more of the others, none of them comprehending the hell you’re being subjected to.

And that’s just how it is for the next few months.

Soon, though, it’ll start to get cold again, and you’ll do anything to have the heat back.