Suzanne Harrington: My garden cabin is now an air-fryer... we need to adapt 

Cooling down at Battersea Park, London. Picture: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire

You know when academic funding is allocated for studies in the bleeding obvious — like people are happier at the weekend, or smoking is bad for you — well, here’s my research funding application: It’s hard to care about anything when you’re too hot.

Here I am, all set to seethe about that pious Unionist nonce Jeffrey Donaldson.

Not just that he’d spent years abusing former children, but the God complex that accompanied it. How his letter to one of them expressed “hope and prayer… that God will help each of us. I pray especially for you… I believe God has great plans for you”.

It’s that last bit — “I believe God has great plans for you” — that would under normal circumstances propel me into steam-out-ears fury.

The hotline to God delusion, implying he has somehow been privy to a celestial planning committee. Who else was on that imaginary Zoom call to the heavens — Jeffrey Epstein? Jeffrey Dahmer? Jimmy Savile?

But these are not normal circumstances, and steam is coming out my ears for different reasons.

The temperature keeps rising — in the UK, we are on a red warning that it may hit 40C.

By the time you read this, we might all be in hoodies again, but right now it’s so hot birds are falling out of trees. Roads are melting, and trains are cancelled. Schools are closed. 

I crack open my World Cup beer for breakfast — 0.0%, no need to call any helplines — because it’s the only cold drink left in the house, as I sit down to rage on the page about Jeffrey Donaldson. Except I can’t because it’s too hot.

The rage seeps away, befuddlement descends, and I am sledgehammered by apathy, like a panting dog under a pub garden table. My garden cabin is now an air-fryer, so I spend ages trying to find the least suffocating corner inside the house to work.

There is none. Our household flops about, listlessly rubbing ice cubes on our pulse points, comparing notes on how badly we’ve slept, and it’s still only 8am.

At least we are not in London, where my partner languishes in his pants, praying for medical evacuation to the coast. 

An extreme heat conference at the London School of Economics is cancelled because of extreme heat, as people faint on buses and Tubes.

Even the pigeons are passing out. I cancel a theatre date because being inside a stuffy Victorian theatre in 40C heat with no aircon would be like sewing yourself into a sleeping bag inside a sauna, and induces feelings of panic.

As does the idea of using wonky, ill-equipped public transport.

A chalkboard outside a pub by the station reads “We have beer and aircon. Your train is probably cancelled anyway.”

The weather is changing far faster than our psychological and practical adaptations to it. We’ve had years — decades — to install aircon in public spaces, but we think aircon is only for hot countries.

We spend a great deal of money, time and effort visiting hot countries, because we love a holiday in the sun — but now we live in hot countries.

Yet when foreign holiday temperatures turn up on our doorstep, we freak out — we are ill-equipped, which is to say we are not equipped at all.

We need to stop calling these things "heatwaves" and engage with the crucial business of making our habitats habitable, for when the mercury goes into hot countries’ territory.

Because these climactic freak occurrences are starting to look a lot like ‘summer’, and we need to adapt.

Fast.

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