We’re plum in the middle of a British summer heatwave – that blissful time when my overseas friends briefly stop complaining about the cold and recline, lizard-like, in contentment.
As a redhead, this is not my time to shine. I should really be hiding in a cave for the duration. Yet while I’m prepared for the sheer stickiness of it all, and the temperatures, I’d forgotten the deathly combination of late-night sleeplessness and heat-induced shopping delirium.
As the heatwave began on Wednesday, I headed home to pass out in the muggy heat of my south London bedroom. Instead, by half-midnight and for the next two hours, I was scrolling the internet. On Thursday morning, I discovered that I had bought two balls for the dog, a cotton shirt for myself, and a diaphanous white dress from John Lewis that looked like an audition costume for Star Wars.
The screenwriter Mollie Goodfellow, similarly compelled to while away her sleepless hours by online shopping, had bought “a vintage bomber jacket for an American country club I’ve never been to”.
Here’s the important thing: mad heatwave shopping is not about sensible things like portable aircon or linen clothing. It’s doing what one friend did and buying £150 of smoked fish on the basis that “we won’t be able to eat hot food for months”. It’s the friend who opened her door one month later to take delivery of a three-foot-long stuffed panda, at which point the completely forgotten memory of ordering it pinged back to life.
Another has simply come to terms with the fact that she will end up wallpapering in summer, as she ends up ordering rolls of it in the middle of the night every time. And for sheer tombola value, credit to my friend who has bought “secateurs, running sunglasses, vermouth and a leaf blower”.
(All of these are real, by the way. If they were made up, they’d all be something sensible but unreachably out of stock, like tower fans.)
It’s not the same as parasomnia, the disruptive umbrella sleep disorder, which can see people genuinely shopping while they are asleep. It’s more that the stifling heat and the usual small-hours weirdness combine to seemingly short-circuit your brain into buying the oddest things. If you’re adding hormones on top, whether pregnancy, postpartum, or perimenopause, things can get even spicier.
My friend Grace has form with small-hours shopping anyway, especially as the parent of a small baby, but her heatwave purchase of “200 superglues at 3am” is a personal best: “I still to this day don’t know what I had planned for them,” she said.
Grace is usually my benchmark for insane shopping stories, but in heatwave terms, she is easily trounced by the comedian Liz Johnson: “I once bought a horse, unseen, from Ireland. I regretted my decision when I had to collect it from a service station on the M6 at the crack of dawn two weeks later.”
Fortunately, Liz is a vet by day, so her impulse purchase was at least in good hands. When I impulsively bought a horse, sight unseen off the internet – as if this is a common occurrence! – I didn’t have a heatwave I could blame.
While riding in 2019, I got a concussion. The next day, I bought a horse on Facebook. It was only while booking the transport that I came to my senses. It took me a month and some very strongly worded solicitors’ letters to get my money back – and I am happy to say that the horse, very much the injured party in all this, soon found a very capable and non-concussed home.
With that in mind, I wish you a very happy heatwave, and suggest those of us prone to small-hours scrolling lock our phones away overnight until at least Monday, when the weather, in south London at least, should plummet to a sanity-restoring 23C.
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