The obligatory “Oh my God, it’s hot” post

Oh my God, it’s hot.

No, it is. Really. It’s extremely hot, in a blood-boiling kind of way. (That’s the weather report for my for­eign read­ers. Par­tic­u­larly my Cana­dian fans, of whom I have — ooh, let me think — at least five at the last count). Well, I’ll be fair, it’s actu­ally quite pleas­ant if you go out and get caught in a breeze. Yet Brit­ish people do get a bit odd in this sort of heat. Pic­ture the scene: I’m sit­ting on a bench out­side Argos, soak­ing up the sun, look­ing through the store cata­logue and con­tem­plat­ing buy­ing myself a new music sys­tem that I can’t really afford. A builder — the per­fect example of a ste­reo­typ­ical young Eng­lish­man in a heat­wave (shorts, train­ers with no socks, vest, iden­tity brace­let, shaved head, wrap­around shades) — sits down next to me and enters into a con­ver­sa­tion. How do I know that he is a builder? Because it’s the first thing he tells me, that’s why. He then pro­ceeds to give me his life his­tory over the past four years since he moved to the local area. This includes what he was doing yes­ter­day, why he’s just bought a big box of crock­ery, and what his girl­friend is like. Every sen­tence is also inter­spersed with a com­ment about how much he wants a cold beer. Then, as a final part­ing shot, he leans over to look at my store cata­logue and advises me on what type of music sys­tem to buy. Even­tu­ally he departs, pre­sum­ably (hope­fully) to get a beer, and before he gets on to the sub­ject of my per­sonal life.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m anti­so­cial. It’s just that this sort of thing doesn’t nor­mally hap­pen to me, and I’m con­vinced that on this occa­sion the main cause was the hot weather. A heat­wave is the per­fect open­ing con­ver­sa­tional gam­bit for the aver­age Bri­ton: “My, it’s hot!” or “It’s the hot­test day of the year / hot­test day this dec­ade / hot­test day this cen­tury / hot­test day since dino­saurs roamed the Earth” (delete as applic­able). And the hot weather means that we can actu­ally stand around and talk about it too. Talk­ing about a rain storm isn’t so much fun because, obvi­ously, you get soaked.

I must apo­lo­gise, though. I think this slight rant has been caused by the fact that, when I got home, I briefly looked in the mir­ror and the sight that greeted me sud­denly made me remem­ber the thing that was bug­ging me all this morn­ing as I left the house. Some­thing I’d for­got­ten — “hot day, warm, sun, cool clothes, bottle of water, sunglasses …” Oh yes, I remem­ber now. Sunscreen.

My face has turned the col­our of a boiled lob­ster — the polite phrase that grand­moth­ers use is “My oh my, you have caught the sun, haven’t you?” — except for a thin white line at the top of my fore­head, and some lighter patches where my sunglasses were. I am a com­plete and utter idiot. Still, it’s not burn­ing, so I’m reas­sured that it will be gone by tomor­row. And in the mean­time, a bottle of factor 15 has been pur­chased and placed in a prom­in­ent pos­i­tion on my bath­room shelf.

My only con­sol­a­tion is that, hav­ing looked in the bath­room cab­inet, I didn’t have any sun­screen there any­way. Hey, we’re Brit­ish. We don’t need it. We don’t screen ourselves from the sun in this coun­try. Oh no. Instead, it only has to make a brief appear­ance and we run towards it with out­stretched arms, scream­ing “SUN!!! Look! Sun! Big yel­low ball of fire in sky! Aieee! Aieee! Aieee! The man from Del Monte — he say YES!!!” (Er, I’m not sure about that last bit).

Oh, how we’ll laugh about this in Novem­ber, when we’re shiv­er­ing in sub-zero tem­per­at­ures and walk­ing through freez­ing sleet.