It’s not that London hasn’t had hot summers in the past, but there are a couple of legendary ones to which everyone always compares every new hot spell. They compare the temperatures, dryness, the duration, the havoc caused, the lawns charred and the flower beds destroyed, the memories, both good and bad, created by the crazy weather. In those championship terms, 1976, 2003 and 2013 have stood out in the past half a century — till this year, that is, when we are possibly looking at a monster of a hot summer that could incinerate all previous records. I wasn’t around in ’76, but I stayed in London through the summer of ’03 and for a good bit of the ’13 one. If I remember correctly, in ’03, the heat started a bit late, with May (which comes under spring) and a bit of June being warm but not overly so. In the third week of June, however, the heat went up a couple of notches and the city — indeed, the whole archipelago — was roasted for over two months. I remember spending that entire period in light shirts, shorts and sandals and not going near shoes or a rain jacket till the third week of September. I remember thinking then that London wasn’t equipped to deal with either heavy snow or serious heat.
Frying pan to fire
It was hot in ’03 and ’13 but this time it is different. The toasting began in London in May and continued relentlessly through all of June and most of July. The heat has seemed as difficult to dislodge as an in-form Sunil Gavaskar or Brian Lara. At first it was all very pleasant. There’s nothing lovelier than a warm, early summer day in this city: flowers blooming, trees resplendent in varied greenery, skies blue and festooned with fighter contrails, people cheerful as they peel off layers of clothes. This time the weather was accompanied by sporting hope, as the England football team tripped and stumbled but stayed alive all the way into the semi-finals of the World Cup. A few days ago, though, things started getting serious, as the accumulative impact of long-term heat began to make itself felt. All around us, the city’s parks, heaths and commons began to change colour from green to yellow-green to a light brown hue of straw. People’s precious gardens began to wilt and curl up as the hosepipe bans began to bite. Quadruped pets are to be kept at home in case their paws get stuck in melted tar. The delays, cancellations and shutdowns of trains and tube lines have now become the norm rather than the exception.
Most interesting is the way people’s behaviour begins to change under pressure. It has long been my theory that people all over the world act in the same way when faced with similar circumstances. So, perhaps it’s not inherent in the nature of South Asians or the Chinese to push and shove and jump queues; that’s how people behave when faced with, say, scarcity and overcrowding of public transport. Similarly, it’s not hardwired into us that we drive badly (though by now it might be, who knows?). It’s what people do when it’s unbearably hot and they’re constantly stuck in a traffic jam. So, it is with a mixture of alarm and schadenfreudy pleasure that I find myself suffocating, sardined in the carriage of a much-delayed train, with people shouting and pushing to get off and on at stations. It is with some thrill that I perspire into a non-AC car seat as people honk and do crazy lane-switching manoeuvres in slow-moving traffic on the highway ringing north London; it is with the satisfaction of a veteran that I find the shadiest spot near a bus stop as others take time to realise that they are becoming kebabs in the sunlight.
Weather dice
Jokes aside, there is always great danger in these till-now infrequent heat waves in the U.K. and Europe. At great risk, for instance, are old people living on their own, people who don’t grasp in time that they can overheat and become dangerously dehydrated in houses primarily designed to keep out the cold. The other unhappy underbelly to this summer is the awareness that a lot of other areas, places that are normally hot in the northern hemisphere’s summer, are being coshed by unbearably high temperatures with devastating effects. From Agra to Accra, global warming is making itself felt and, by all scientific calculations, this is just the beginning of the Big Broil. In the U.K., even as people start talking about getting used to warmer summers, there is an understanding of the need to put in place plans for an unpredictable weather graph which could include severely hot months one year and a summer of torrential rainfall and flooding the next.
In the meantime, on the second consecutive day when the betting chains are offering odds on whether the record of 38.5°C set in 2003 will be broken today, some strange stuff appears in the grimly blue sky. After a while, one recognises the things as clouds, proper dark grey rain clouds. The wind starts, it begins to thunder, there is lightning, and then the water comes down, not quite lashing down but in proper showers. As the parched ground receives the water, you can almost compare the smell to the fragrance of the earth at home after the first monsoon showers.
