Enjoying the heat? It is at times like this that I would really like to live on the coast, that thought of a mild sea breeze. The house I live in is designed to retain heat in the winter. In summer it sucks in heat, we made sure of this by building a conservatory on the south side. To make doubly certain that it would resemble a furnace on Venus we also did a loft conversion that has glass doors all the way along it. Great. In winter it is delightful. Most recently, in June and July 2026, the temperature has reached 35 degrees indoors, dropping to around 31 degrees as we head for another fitful nights sleep. The only solution is to have the windows and doors open to create some kind of through draught. This works only slightly, an evening temperature of 31 might decline to 26 by the morning. And by morning I mean 4am in the morning, as this is when it gets light and wakes us up. It makes little difference, truncated sleep is at least sleep.
On the plus side, public transport aside the weather during the daytime is fine, I don't have a particular problem with it. My plants love it, the cycads, aloes and agaves are going great guns. A dasylirion is flowering, the spike about three metres tall so far. I enjoy the early morning watering routine before I go to work. But it is the weekends that are particulaly lovely, I have a garden which has both full sun for succulents and shaded areas for ferns and so on. And people. The garden furniture is in use constantly, the Rosé is in full flow, the brick-built BBQ - now in it's 21st year of operation - continues to get a lot of use, we really foretold the future when we had that put in.
You will be surprised to hear that I recently went on holiday. When I left we were in the grips of the second heat wave. Lots of things broke down as it was too hot. Trains gave up, in fact it wasn't even possible to get to the terminal I was flying from and I had to take a bus. In Brazil it was hotter still and everything worked just fine. It calmed down a bit when I was away, and then on the day that I came back cranked up again. The start of next week continues to be pretty warm by all accounts, and it is only towards the end of next week that it finally breaks and we get a bit of relief. Dramatic belief I expect. Those nights are pretty exciting too, and for different reasons result in a lack of sleep. This is what we should expect every summer.
I am still building up to writing up Georgia from May. The fact that I now have the Brazilian Amazon stacked up behind is adding to the pressure but I am not caving in just yet. It is there, just below the surface, but there are other things I don't want to do that are also vying for attention. Tax returns, cleaning out cupboards, that kind of thing. Which will win?
