SO how have you been faring in the exotic, tropical climate of ours this past week? Cool, calm and collected? No, I thought not. Me neither.
Daytimes have been a trial of endurance, what with finding something to wear that keeps the sun off, the heat out and modesty paramount. Pasty-white limbs must retain their hideous pallor for fear of hastening a certain death-by-sunray, but keeping them out of harm’s way takes a certain ingenuity that owes nothing to catwalk fashion trends. Best wrap ’em up and roast, is my motto, because the alternative might be too frightening for the world to cope with.
But if the days have been uncomfortable and sticky, the nights have been much worse.
I haven’t yet encountered anyone who hasn’t moaned like mad about the difficulty of sleeping. Airless bedrooms like ours, tucked away under the eaves, are all well and good for hunkering down on chill winter nights, but when a body is aching for a cool breeze and none comes, the nights seem very long.
My sister tells me she stalks the house through the still hours, trying every bed until, like Goldilocks, she settles in one that has a slightly lower temperature than the others. Even that trick didn’t work on Sunday night when, she tells me, she had no more than about 20 minutes’ sleep. I told her I hope she will have cured herself of her nocturnal wanderings before she next has guests to stay.
At Hill Towers the discomfort and lack of sleep reached a level serious enough for me to inspect our duvet, suspecting it might be part of the reason for our habit of waking up feeling as though we were inside a raging furnace. ‘It’s like being in my own funeral pyre,’ Geoff complained. He was not far wrong, as it turned out, for I found that our duvet was a 13.5 tog model, something rather more suited to winter nights in an igloo. I treated us to a summer-weight 4.5 togger, which is still far too hot but which should be fine for when the weather settles down into ordinary British summer mode.
Geoff lugged up from the cellar an elderly pedestal fan that has been pressed into service in the bedroom. It is rather noisy but it’s worth putting up with that intrusion if it helps reduce the sauna-like temperature. We have it set on ‘oscillate’, which saves us arguing about who should have the fan directed at them. This is all very well and democratic, but I find that, as I lie there giving off heat like a small but powerful nuclear reactor, all hope of sleep evades me as I wait, tense and alert, for the fan to whirr round to my side and waft cool air on to me for a second or two. The relief is delightful, but the fan whirrs on past, giving me just enough time to get back up to mutliple-mega-meltdown temperature before it whirrs back to me again. And so it goes on. And on. And so the night passes, eventually, slipping wearily into another dusty day, where it isn’t just dogs who slurp water noisily and lie panting in the heat. Look around you in any public park . . .
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