Hot! Hot! Hot!

It’s been hot recently, have you noticed? Not just ‘hot for here’ but properly hot, Mediterranean hot. The kind of hot that makes normal people sweat in a way that makes us fat folks shout, “Now you know how I feel every day, whatever the weather!” It’s been so hot that streets have been melting and so have people. It’s the kind of weather that we in Britain get so rarely that it makes the front cover of newspapers. Who can forget the classic “Phew, What a Scorcher” headline? That’s how it’s been this year. We don’t get summers like the current one very often so people can sometimes let the heat go to their heads – literally and figuratively. They don’t realise that Anglo-Saxons like me aren’t built for this kind of weather. When it’s like this you have to be careful.

I’ve been doing the sensible things like staying inside in the shade, opening and closing the windows so that the ones on the cool side of the house let the most air in, drinking lots of water and having my fan on so much that the oscillating twister thing that turns it from side to side has broken. Now one side of me is frozen while the other is sweating like the proverbial pig. I keep having to turn around as if I’m on a spit. I’ve been taking naps at lunchtime wherever required and feasible, and I’ve not been overexerting myself.

My neighbours however have not being doing any such sensible things. They’ve never been in the house. We have a piece of communal land behind the house and they’ve pretty much commandeered it, sitting outside from morning till (their) bedtime (which is long after mine), drinking coffee and alcohol (both of which dehydrate you even further) and moving their plastic garden chairs to follow the sun across the sky for maximum potentially cancerous effects. They’re sweating even more than I am and permanently squinting into the sun. They have visitors over just about all the time who come for an hour or two or six and join them in their sun-worshipping.

They’re not overly loud, not affecting me in any way really. They’re just doing everything that we’re told not to. They’re blatantly ignoring all the health warnings and deliberately putting their bodies at risk. It’s shocking and I can’t for the life of me understand why they’d do such things.

So why do they permanently seem to have huge grins on their faces?