Marvellous that a bit of summer and Vitamin D has arrived. All winter I’ve longed for some baking heat, but now that it’s here, I’m having to keep out of it. My brachycephalic dog and I are both lying about indoors like melting slugs, and I’m studying an online heat-rash gallery, because I think that’s what I got about 10 years ago, the last time I tried an extended sunbathe. I sat in the shade on a seaside holiday, with my legs poking into the sun, hoping to get rid of the celery look, but all I got was itchy, pink blotches. Now I get them everywhere, plus “fatigue ... and a feeling of weakness”. Perhaps I am too old to sunbathe.
Odd, because I come from a family of self-poachers. Into their 80s, both my parents would lay baking in the sun for hours, with no ghastly after-effects. They didn’t stagger indoors, knackered after 10 minutes, as I do.
“This is a first-world problem,” says Fielding rather sniffily. “The heat is not a medieval plague. It’s very pleasant.” Quite right. In the grand scale of things, this is a pootling problem, but the news is full of colossal problems that I despair of and don’t have space for here, so I’m sticking to this: the increasing limitations and hazards of old age.
Anyway, lucky Fielding is down by the Dorset coast, fanned by a sea breeze. He has perhaps forgotten his last efforts to sunbathe in a sweltering, fetid town, where he lasted only seven minutes before having to totter inside, sweating, reeling, head throbbing, half blinded and lie on the kitchen floor like molten lard.
He survived, but he was tempting fate. To everyone young and healthy: watch out for any such sweating, wilting, giddy, nauseous elderly neighbours, hose them down, confiscate the caffeine and alcohol, and save them from dangerous heatstroke. Just so no one has to do that for us, Rosemary and I will be staying mainly indoors, in loose garments, gazing out at the lovely, broiling summer. We can cope. I think this summer lasts till Thursday.
