Having spent more than half my life living in Scotland, I found weather was probably the most common topic of casual conversation with colleagues. This is because Edinburgh, where I worked as a physician, is freezing for 11 months of the year, and Glasgow, where I was a consultant anaesthetist, rains for the same period. Hot weather was as unrequited a desire as George Clooney walking into the surgical theatre coffee room.
When we were blessed with the one month that the sun shone weakly down on us for a few minutes, we basked. Never mind that the warmth was so faint we had to take a woolly jumper everywhere – out we would come in our summer garb, turning to the distant orb like sunflowers, insisting on sitting outside in pubs and cafés while shivering. I’ve noticed that in the Côte d’Azur, where it is genuinely roasting much of the year, the citizens are the opposite, donning fur coats well into May because they are so used to being lightly griddled that even a temperature of 25°C seems chilly to them.
When I started spending more time in London, I was gleeful. Back to proper seasons! How easy it was to put up with the winter snow when you knew you’d be sun-kissed for at least three months of the year.
Maybe it’s an age thing, though. Despite the sun making me feel happy, I would rather observe it from a well-ventilated room than sit in it. Part of this is fastidiousness: I like being freshly showered and fragrant, and the trouble with hot weather is the narrow line between soaking up the heat with reverence and wishing you could take all your clothes off and go into the shower.
The problem is exacerbated if you don’t drive and can’t use the tubes: since I am now a double amputee, on the rare occasions that I am fit to go out, we travel by bus. There is no greater leveller than London buses – you may get on a prince but you will leave a damp and irritable pauper, wishing you could afford to take taxis everywhere. Buses to and from the centre of London are almost always packed, and the new cycle lanes that take up most of the road near where I stay, Chiswick, mean that buses crawl along in the same single lane as all cars. It takes four times as long to get anywhere. As for low traffic emissions – pull the other one. A gridlock of vehicles with their engines on for hours creates far more pollution than the previous fast-moving two lanes of traffic did.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many seats in public life are plastic. I spend at least three days a week travelling to and from hospital and sitting on hard plastic chairs in waiting rooms. I can of course choose to remain seated in my wheelchair, which is what I do most of the time now, but wheelchair seats – like the chairs (and mattresses) in the NHS – are all made of easy-wipe plastic. Convenient for cleaning, not so pleasant if you have to sit for hours. The seats on buses are no better, being made of brushed acrylic that feels as if you are sitting on a freshly coiffured dog: itchy and non-breathable.
When I was young, I would soak up the sun and turn a deep brazil nut brown. But the education about melanoma (and, more vainly, wrinkles) finally permeated my brain and, since SPF makes my eyes stream, I don’t bother wearing it and therefore avoid the sun. I’m also very wary of my almost translucently white Scottish husband. His legs look like spaghetti before cooking, and his torso like a sheaf of A5 paper. He also has a couple of moles at his collar, and I scrutinise them suspiciously every time he lingers in the sun and comes back pink. He too is not keen on SPF, but, not having the Persian genes, his skin protests loudly whenever he goes out in the sun, turning the colour of a raw pork sausage.
There is no greater leveller than London buses – you may get on a prince but you will leave a damp and irritable pauper
When I was earning decent money, I bought clothes, usually from Asos, which is cheap enough that you don’t feel bad if you never wear the items. Summer dresses were my favourite fix – the idea of floating around, skirt billowing in the breeze, is always very pleasant but in practice a crisp cotton dress will only waft alluringly on the breeze for a few minutes before it becomes creased and covered in grass stains and bus seat juice of the day (it would be good if it were juice – often it is body fluids).
Add to this the numerous insects that appear in summer, and it’s enough to make me long for the extortionate central heating bills in Scotland. I’m phobic of spiders, and heat seems to imbue their long, hairy legs with extra power to climb into my flat and scuttle around. Sometimes I imagine them crawling into my ears as I sleep and laying hundreds of eggs. Wasps and midges are a pain, and I always feel upset when I see bumblebees lying on the pavement, looking as if they need CPR.
Then there are the inevitable invitations to barbecues. They are fine if you are carnivorous, but even though I eat fish and occasionally chicken, the stench of food smoking away on a barbecue makes me feel nauseous, and the added heat is a torture for whoever is flipping the burgers.
Being by an outdoor swimming pool used to be my favourite way of enjoying hot weather. This never happened in Glasgow. I enjoyed it on a couple of holidays, but after I lost a leg, I realised that I would be forever turning in circles like a shark. However, I do prefer summer food to winter. I love cherries and berries and gazpacho, and a cool glass of white wine with the air from the window circulating is pretty blissful. Perhaps summer, like so many other things – pop concerts, theatre performances, movies, political arguments – is best enjoyed in your living room.
Comments