As summer broke, Paris Hilton boarded a small plane for an aerial tour of Dubai. Can you imagine anything hotter? Of course, you and I have experienced heat, too, this heat that feels like you’re standing in a wind tunnel of all your past humiliations, farting past you one by one. This heat that bodes badly for the summer/civilisation, this heat that brings our primality to the surface. Fear. It blows in on the heat.
So Paris is on the plane. Within minutes of taking off, the aircraft began to dive. Alarms sounded. Everybody was screaming – some passengers strapped on parachutes and jumped out into the sky. When the plane landed safely, Hilton learned she had been pranked by a TV show called Ramez in Control.
The terror. Not only did she think she was going to die (updates alternate between “She was in on it” and “She’s suing them”), but she learned she would appear on a show called Ramez in Control.
My friend Becca went on a course to cure her fear of flying. It culminated with a flight over Brighton in which she learned what every crunching noise meant. But since she explained it to me I’ve found flying excruciating. The noises never sound like the noises Becca described – she passed on her anxiety to me. Ramez in Control appears to be pinpointing people’s biggest fears and acting them out with flying props.
I can’t remember a summer when more of our primal fears were being tested. Sharks, for instance. Sharks are attacking people. According to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida (and if you’ve ever heard of a scarier file I urge you to please keep it to yourself) sharks have already attacked 10 people off the coast of North and South Carolina this year. Why? One big reason is global warming – the sea is getting too hot. Clambering up the beach with a sharked limb hanging from a single string of human meat will be for nothing, because when you get there the earth will promptly melt due to broken forests. Perhaps Ramez is responsible for the sharks too. Ramez? Lads? Are you there? A shark was seen in Kent for the second time last week. People put photographs on Twitter, a looming dorsal fin a mile off the coast of Reculver, blurry but murderous, like a fourth drink. So: sharks.
Next up on the is-this-real-life list of things to fear this summer: robots! If last week’s story about a 22-year-old man killed at a VW factory had been reported as an industrial accident it’s unlikely the news would have made it out of Germany. It wasn’t. It was Man Killed By Robot. The robot picked him up and crushed him. Immediately the mind goes, again, to murder, because that’s the way our minds have learned to go. How long, we wonder, had this evil machine been sweating through a heatwave, plotting his death? Gone are any thoughts of the man himself. And gone are thoughts of hydraulics and programming – raw and real-seeming is the idea that this thing had a brain and flashing eyes, and a thirst for power. One day, the TV reasoning goes, our toasters will eat us all.
Hey, you know what else is going to make you sick as you go: “Hell, let’s eat on the patio, why not?” That sausage. “Unless you use three forks” was the crux of the Mail’s major investigation into how barbecuing will kill you, which included, but was not limited to, ice cream, chicken packaging, rice and the grass.
Then it was reported this week that it’s not chlorine that irritates your eyes when you cool off in the pool. It’s piss. “It’s not the chlorine itself,” said the chief of the Centers for Disease Control. “It’s chlorine mixed with poop, [urine] and sweat.” And the stronger a pool smells of chlorine, the filthier it is. “Healthy pools” don’t smell. Fear – fear smells. When you smell chlorine, worry.
So that’s that then. Summer 2015. With heat comes filth, sharks, vomit, Paris Hilton and death. Have a lovely weekend.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
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