‘Enduring the heatwave is an Irishman's purgatory’

By the morning of my son’s birthday last week, the temperature had hit a positively hostile 34C. This has not been a happy time for me. Worse, for most of my adult life, I have been guilty of making my distaste towards heat too large a part of my personality. I am big enough to admit my failings and can now say, categorically, that this has been a strategic error.

I should be clear at the start, this hatred is sincere. Barring showers or saunas, or the consuming of food and beverages intended to be served at piping temperatures, I do truly despise heat in all its forms. I can make allowances for the cosy feeling of entering a warm house in the frigid depths of winter, or the novel thaw I get from sliding under a wintertime electrical blanket on those occasions when I’ve found myself staying with the sort of people who own electric blankets. But ambient heat, constant heat, that outdoor/indoor, soul-sapping heat of a summer heatwave, I detest. Truly. I don’t care if I’m dressed lightly, lounging at a pool or strolling by the seaside – anything over 20C is showing off. Anything over 30C is manslaughter, and a hate crime against me, personally.

And, yes, I am loud about this. I mention it a lot. For the most part, this is useful. In 99% of cases, it is a great enlivener of small talk, allowing me to attack by the throat the very thing which everyone else seems to be enjoying, but with enough of a wink that it’s clear I’m just having fun ha ha ha seriously though kill me ha ha ha. It allows me to seem amiably contrary in polite company and make myself, the red-faced Irishman sweating profusely and feeling like death, the butt of the joke before anyone else gets the chance to ask why I look like I’ve just climbed out of a swimming pool fully clothed. Nobody, it turns out, feels ownership of hot weather, so raging against it offends no one, even as they tell me how lovely they’re all finding it, the way you might tell a drowning man how good saltwater is for his pores.

But, unfortunately, one gets a name for such talk, and when the allotted period of hot weather – typically two weeks throughout an entire year – is exhausted, it comes back to bite me. During the three-week heatwave which led to my son’s seventh birthday, I had all but run out of things to say and, worse, as said heatwave continued, the topic began preceding me. Every parent who arrived for cake and wine gave joy to the birthday boy, before earnestly asking me “How are you holding up?”

“Oh, fine!” I’d say, wreathed by those vertical lines of near-invisible sweat which have been bisecting my head for most of the past month. “I was thinking about you when it reached 30C on Friday,” one mum added, her voice betraying genuine concern, as if I were a dog she’d recently passed, whimpering, in a locked car.

I’ve attempted to adapt. To get over myself. We have fans and misted sprays and I use them liberally. A week in, we bought a cooling unit – a fancy one, into which can be fed water and ice – and soon I became addicted to its chilly gusts, establishing a routine of lowering myself to the ground so that its frigid blasts might be enjoyed head-on.

This, to give you a visual, means guzzling up its life-giving refrigeration while sitting on the floor, looking not unlike a hostage chained to a radiator. It’s a practice that’s all well and good in the ordinary privacy of one’s own home, but harder to engineer when your house is filled with dozens of children and adults, and you’re supposed to be hosting.