A new ice hockey crush is zero help in this heatwave

It started with a whisper. “It’s so hot, I can’t believe it” … “I’m overheating” … “This is insane.” I leaned in to agree. But no, they weren’t talking about the heatwave – it seems every single friend I met this week has been watching the new ice hockey drama Off Campus.

Turns out Heated Rivalry wasn’t a fluke: there is something weirdly compelling about watching ice hockey. Or at least about watching ice hockey players kissing. This show is a kind of a Much Ado About Nothing for gen Z – the beefcake ice hockey jock pretends to date a sweet, nerdy girl if she tutors him in philosophy. He gets the hang of Kierkegaard’s theory of subjective truth about as quickly as he gets her into bed.

I can recommend watching it purely for the psychological cooling effect of all that Canadian ice, though I can’t promise the show itself won’t raise your temperature again. My Canadian grandma is very pleased I’ve taken an unexpected liking to the national sport. I just hope she doesn’t watch and find out why.

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Last Wednesday night I made a sweaty journey to the Cinema Museum in south London, an extraordinary old factory brimming with movie posters, for a talk about postmodernism and the Kardashians. I dragged along a friend who has proudly never engaged in the Kardashian-Jenner world and she emerged converted. The Kardashians, we found out, are the new Disney Corp. The medium is the message and the message is Kim Kardashian’s ass.

We learned that their project is much bigger than selfies or Kris Jenner’s new face. The family are, in fact, engaged in a kind of “high camp” duel with death. Their utterly surveilled life is really part of our very human wish for eternity. When we are all dust, it will be the Kar-Jenners who are remembered, having inventoried their lives so exactly that they’ve left a televised accounting of humanity. If only we all had Kris Jenner as our momager.

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I had already died inside after a truly pathetic trip to the London Fields Lido in east London during the peak of the bank holiday heat. Having run out of ice-cream and willpower, my flatmate and I were desperate to swim as we joined the equally frustrated queue. Here was all life, I thought naively as I looked out at laughing friends, parents bobbing their babies in the water, tentative first dates – aren’t we so lucky? Then the tweens arrived.

Every girl was somehow 11 years old with a full skincare routine and every boy had the haircut of a Premier League footballer. Together, they possessed the energy of a pack of wolves out for blood. Within minutes, we – two fully grown adults – were being sneakily but unmistakably bullied out of the queue. One girl in jorts informed us we were “hovering weirdly”. Another boy looked at my tote bag and laughed.

Suddenly, we were struck by the overwhelming feeling that perhaps we didn’t need to swim after all. Maybe all we needed was a coffee. We began the slow, humiliating retreat: loudly insisting we “weren’t even that bothered about swimming” while edging backwards and scurrying off. May we hope for cooler summers, shorter lido queues and a society in which 11-year-olds once again fear adults, rather than the other way around?

Photograph Liane Hentscher/Amazon Prime