You might have noticed I’ve been conspicuously absent for a while, for which I can only apologise. The truth is, I’ve been charged with the reckless and unlawful application of crème anglaise to an apple pie. I’ve been remanded in custardy.
Good news, though – it’s allowed me to catch up on some reading, including one fascinating book I must tell you about. (Remind me later, ok?)
It’s also given me time to write again. With that in mind, let’s move on to the topic of today’s post.
The topic of today’s post
Everyone knows there are three certainties in life: death, taxes and rampant nasal hair. But alongside those, there is, inevitably, a fourth: relentlessly frustrating British weather.
It’s been a very strange year with our weather here in Britain. Over the winter months it rained almost non-stop. To the point where men with long beards began getting fidgety and quietly drafting plans to build boats and round up pairs of animals.
At times, there was so much rain falling from the skies that I considered commuting to work by hovercraft.
And yet here we are just a few months later and the weather has been drier than a sponge cake in a sauna. We’ve been warned our reservoirs have never been emptier, and forced to resort to increasingly desperate methods – like siphoning water from next door’s hot tub.
“Shorten the length of your showers to four minutes,” water companies said. They even created four-minute-shower Spotify lists for us to sing along to, to help us keep track of time. I checked, and there’s no Meatloaf in any of them (I was tentatively reserving that one for a hair wash). They did have Bonnie Tyler and Aerosmith in there, though. So, two out of three ain’t bad...
As you know by now, I’m always eager to help where I can. So, throughout this summer I’ve been harvesting water by making my friends cry and collecting their tears in a pipette. I’m storing them in an old milk bottle from the 1990s: a bit of nostalgia from a time when we were allowed to shower for 10 hours a day and wash our cars 34 times per week.
Looking back at the 1990s, those really were the days, weren’t they? Back then we were only chopping down a mere 150 football pitches of the Amazon each day. Barely a light pruning. And the climate emergency was merely a catastrophic event in the making, and a subplot to a David Attenborough documentary in which we chuckled at some penguins falling off ice.
Climatologists have been kind enough to create a word for the extreme shifts we’re seeing between wet winters and dry summers – Climate Whiplash.
I guess we’re now reaping the consequences of our modern, fast-paced lives – flying wherever we want for a fiver, eating steak five times a week and having things delivered before we’ve even ordered them.
Still, it’s comforting to know that whilst we’re doing our bit by recycling our toilet roll tubes and washing our yoghurt pots, tech billionaires are doing their bit by burning 498 million tons of rocket fuel to take selfies in space. And now they’re building enormous resource-sucking data centres so that we can ask a hallucinating chatbot for their take on why the world is burning.
And we’re being told by climatologists that this is not the new normal – merely a new baseline.
It’s going to get hotter.
Hearing that, I find myself picturing a dystopian future where sunlight itself is lethal, and people are forced into extreme measures to block out the deadly, killer sun from entering their houses. Covering up windows with anything they can find – Amazon boxes, old crates and blankets, old mattresses. Otherwise, it’s curtains.
I think that joke sounded better in my head.
Anyway, it won’t be long before we’ll be whiplashed back into winter and I’ll be complaining about how wet and dreary it is, and considering strapping an SAD lamp to my face. It’s all part of being British.
Ok, I think I’m all done for today. There’s things you need to be getting on with, like topping up the hot tub, and I want to get back to the fascinating book I mentioned earlier (thanks for the reminder). It’s about euthanasia. I can’t put it down.
Until next time, friends. 👋
Alastair
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