We have all gone absolutely bonkers. The weather has unplugged us. The whole of Britain has become the Daily Express. If it hadn’t rained last week, there was a very real threat that we would have started eating each other. Something switched, about a fortnight into the heatwave, when half the country’s relationships had ended purely because sharing a bed with another clammy body was no longer viable as a lifestyle choice and a series of sleepless nights had led to a whole nation walking round as red-eyed and glutinous-minded as new parents. Something switched and, collectively, we lost it. I shared a rush-hour train with a topless businessman. He made eye contact only with the model in the hair-loss ad. Everywhere, the smell of beer and meat.
Children cried for three weeks solid, the sound of ice-cream vans a glorious tinnitus. Clothes had not been invented that could keep us cool, and also contain these bodies that we were suddenly aware of having to carry around with us like InterRailing rucksacks. Why couldn’t we just be minds in this heat, brains, riding around in plastic domes on top of clever dogs? Why must we heave around all these idiot limbs, all this hair? The heat made us think of ourselves in the third person, a character that must be manoeuvred from home to work without hurting anybody. It messed with our ethics, our body odour. Two drinks in, complete strangers were snogging against lampposts, then it got hotter, and even sex people stopped having sex. Seen from above, our green and pleasant land appeared yellow and mean.
At a park I saw a woman who had taken her shoes off and thrown them in a lake. Walking along the seafront, the beach to the right of me sprinkled with McFlurrys, I saw a boy start a fight with a seagull. Inevitably, all conversations began drifting towards global warming, whether they started at Love Island or cancer, except it was too hot to remember the facts, so across Britain bubbles of doom floated from our mouths, popping listlessly above us with words such as “problem”. Sleeping with the windows open led to vivid dreams, and vivid dreams led to people telling each other their vivid dreams, which led to ruinous fractures in many office friendships and also unwanted insights into each other’s desires. My cat, her body spilled across a tiled floor, looked confused. Every evening I’d brush a fistful of hair from her back while she bit at my finger, apologetic. Then one day, people started talking about rain.
Conversations about weather were no longer small talk. There was competitive sharing of information from apps, one saying the heat was going to continue until Sunday, another saying to expect highs of 35C – on the news things spontaneously caught fire. The first yearnings for rain were phrased as jokes, the second were more pleading and the third were almost violent in their intensity. The people wanted a referendum for rain, they deserved a say. Clicking frantically through Screwfix, Amazon, Currys and Argos, I discovered electric fans had sold out across the country – stockpiling had begun. I was in a Wagamama at a leisure centre when it came, the rain, but the smell arrived first, like a carrier bag of 2ps left on the hob. In the car park, a fully grown adult danced round a tree with his takeaway, Nando’s own Gene Kelly. Girls were screaming outside the bowling alley. My washing needed rewashing.
Even after the heat broke, we continued our descent into madness, arguing about the meaning of breezes, disoriented by the concept of “jackets”. Yes the plants looked healthier, but our heads were still dehydrated, brains the consistency of space food. It was July but comedians welcomed winter, and all your worst cousins stage-whispered on social media about how they were putting the heating on. After two days of modest rain and pale skies, the heat had been completely forgotten and everybody was back in bad moods and denim. This is part of the madness, our inability to recall the feeling of standing in sunshine, of sweat pooling at the base of our backs. When we rolled over one morning to damply glug deeply from last week’s stale glass of water, and discovered summer had returned, the shock was real.
The cycle began again, the delight, the complaints, the man with skin like a tree shouting “legs” at schoolgirls outside the post office. The narrowing of eyes at neighbours’ hosepipes, the affairs that began largely because hotels are air-conditioned, the elaborate Home Alone-style contraptions designed not to maim burglars but instead to cool a bedroom, the emergence of belly buttons and other things everyone had forgotten existed. The weather is giving us madness, both from the way it screws with our bodies and routines, and from the way it pushes us right to the edge, then walks away whistling. The weather is the only thing that the whole of Britain really shares, and we don’t know what to do with that.
One more thing…
Best takeaway from Love Island: Dani Dyer calls her grandad ‘bruv’ and Danny Dyer calls his daughter ‘mate’. This is what we call ‘relationship goals’.
In Gordon Ramsay’s new show he will ‘attempt to beat some of the best chefs from around the world at their own cuisine.’ Oh darling, no. Saying that though, I’d definitely tune in to see him rustle up a Friday night dinner, the gefilte fish, the kneidlach, chopped liver, challah, in order to ‘beat’ a room of Jewish grandmas, if only to see his haunted face as he left. With two carrier bags of cling-filmed leftovers, of course.
Last week, I called the police after following a guy escaping from a crime scene. He got into a car, and I started chanting the number plate to myself as I dialled 999 so as not to forget it. I was on the line for six minutes before I got through. And all the time I was imagining the terrible things that could happen to a person in that wait.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
