Caves of ice

Summertime, and the living is… variable. Depends who you ask. People come to mind, of course: one in hospital, waiting for an MRI scan; another just come out of hospital having had two little frosted ova thawed out and implanted, so with a bit of luck she’ll have a baby at last.

One old chap, 90-ish, with several basal cell carcinomas on his pate from his young days as an army officer in the Palestine sun, is going for a painless zap with a cryoprobe: lesions gone and a free pathology section into the bargain. And over at Cern the Large Hadron Collider has sent a new pentaquark lately to the firmament.

The mind, generally, lags. It needs a book to provoke it into fresh life, into noticing old things anew. Tom Jackson’s Chilled will do very well indeed, especially on a hot day of lassitude and indolence. A day like this one, almost dead of its own heat. ‘Fair summer droops’, as Thomas Nashe says. A day which once called for a heat-flushed girl, hair damp against her nape, now requires an iced mojito, droplets licking slowly down the glass, while the sea bass bakes. Then chilled Prosecco for sprezzatura, Orfeo on Spotify, and a bottle of artisanal Sacred Gin on ice should the vicar drop in. The salad’s in the crisper… but, damn, the shopping list proclaims from its fridge magnet: salad dressing. So it’s out in this delirious heat, but at least the car has aircon.

And all of this depends on one thing: cold. More precisely, it depends on chilling: things being colder than they would be naturally.

The infant(s)-to-be depend for their frozen suspended animation upon liquid nitrogen, at -192°C. The MRI scanners depend, like the LHC, on magnets supercooled in liquid helium at -269°C.