This week a heatwave hit the UK and gave us something new to talk about.
I’m usually one to roll my eyes at weather chat. It scores high on the scale of banality; somewhere between ‘I had the weirdest dream last night’ and ‘How was your weekend?’.
But after six months of Covid-talk, it’s been quite pleasant to be shown maps of Great Britain numbered by Celsius, rather than death rates.
The ‘great leveller’ of the week was not coronavirus, but the fight against perspiration.
If there’s one thing that brings Brits together, it’s a moan about the weather. Especially when it comes to the inconvenience it brings to our lives.
Usual social etiquette has been thrown out of the window and replaced with what I like to call ‘sweatiquette’.
Everything about our usual human interactions is overruled by the heat. Standard dress codes no longer apply. Our wardrobe becomes less focussed on what’s appropriate for the occasion, and centres instead on survival.
Unless you’re Prince Andrew circa 2001, the past few days will have been fairly sweaty.
At least we’re all in it together. We’ve shared tweets about heat-induced sleep deprivation, photos of our disappointingly small paddling pools ordered online, and our struggles wearing masks in 30 degree heat.
As someone who becomes self-conscious when they sweat, I have the utmost respect for those who perspire without fuss. Who let it drip from their brow to their chin and simply dab away the excess with a napkin. So classy.
I take the opposite, more theatrical approach of announcing how sweaty I am to the entire room. In an act of self-deprecating desperation, I’ll show people exactly where I’m sweating in an attempt to break the ice I wish I was swimming in.
I’ll grab any waftable object within reach and fan myself with vigour. In my mind, I look like the romantic lead in an Oscar Wilde classic. In reality, I’m a hot mess.
But it is comforting to know that everyone else is having their ability to function hit by the heat, too.
Heat gives us something to moan about, a shared disgust in the metaphysical and what could be more uniting than that?
Last night I woke up to soaking sheets, panicking that I’d wet the bed. I froze in horror at the thought of my partner noticing it.
I stared at the ceiling, planning how to remove the piss-stained linen from beneath his sleeping body without waking him up.
Imagine my relief when I regained full consciousness and realised that it was just sweat, and I don’t have a boyfriend.
If I had a partner, I certainly wouldn’t be interested in any form of close physical contact in the bedroom. Unless he’s Iceman, I would rather sleep on the sofa than with another human being.
The body language experts can say what they like, if it’s 30 degrees, it’s separate bedrooms. Heatwave: 1, Intimacy: 0.
The temperature has even dictated my interior design. I’ve bought more fans than a fraudulent influencer, yet my bedroom remains filled with more hot air than a coronavirus daily briefing.
Even our collective mood has been dictated by the weather. We all tend to get a little over-dramatic when it’s hot. The everyday greeting of ‘how are you?’ is met with ‘I’M DYYYYING’, which, let’s face it, is probably far more accurate than the usual ‘I’m fine’.
We are miserable, but we are miserable together.
As much as the heatwave has separated us from our normal existence, it has united us against a common enemy. Heat gives us something to moan about, a shared disgust in the metaphysical and what could be more uniting than that?
As I check the weather forecast for the week ahead, I see we are destined for torrential rain.
How fabulous, we can all have a moan about how wet it is instead.
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