Back in April, I wrote about the British preoccupation with the weather. With the onset of spring and its usual mix of hopeful sunshine and freezing rain, we prepared ourselves to do what we do every summer: complain about the lack of reliable sunshine, the inevitability of rain, the difficulty of planning ahead to do anything that involves being outside. Of course, back then, we had no idea what was coming.
Recently, we tramped up to Beachy Head (with about a thousand other people) to witness the sun being eclipsed by the moon. For a brief moment, as the sky darkened, I shivered in my t-shirt and shorts and realised how normal it had become to wander out in the evening without so much as a jacket or sweater. I can’t ever remember doing this before in all the thirty nine years I’ve lived in Britain. Both air and sea temperatures are at a record high. We’re officially in drought and now we’re harvesting the grey water from our kitchen and shower to keep our young trees, pot plants and tomatoes alive. I just hope they don’t mind Redken shampoo.
Back from Devon, we invite twenty or so friends for lunchtime drinks. As luck would have it, a twenty five mile an hour wind springs up and whips around the corner of our house. The sun on the terrace is as hot as ever but it’s too windy to put up the gazebo. ‘No problem,’ I say, ‘we’ll just have to stay indoors.’ But I figure without the will of our guests. The terrace acts as a magnet and, at one point, while dispensing fizz and canapés, I look out to see two of them bent over the table desperately hanging onto the umbrella to stop it flying across the garden.
‘It’s too windy,’ I say, but I might as well talk the cat. By the end of the party, the terrace is full of chatting people, hair flying across their faces, while they grip onto champagne flutes to stop them blowing over and smashing. Perhaps British people just feel more comfortable battling the elements. But as some of them are Australian and American, that doesn’t really explain it.
Talking of battling the elements, I’ve been gripped recently by Sara Wheeler’s account of her months spent in Antarctica (Terra Incognita). It’s full of candid personal observations, exploration history and scientific facts. Who knew that the South Pole is ten thousand feet above sea level? Or that it has the fourth highest mountain in the southern hemisphere at nearly five thousand metres? Or that much of it is classified as desert because it hasn’t rained or snowed for two million years? Well, maybe you did, but I realise that, although I used to live far closer to it than I do now, I know almost nothing about it. There are penguins and it’s dark for half of the year and that’s about it. I keep irritating Adrian with the words, ‘Did you know . . .’ and ‘Listen to this . . .’ Irritating because he intends reading the book himself and wants to be left with a few surprises.
Once our party is over, the weather reverts to being still and hot and we enjoy a delicious barbecue with friends, Marianna and Ray. Marianna is the best salad-maker in the world, every one of them a mouth watering novelty. My own preparations for the visit from Adrian’s family are puny by comparison. But we enjoy our time with them enormously. It’s an annual event, worked into Debby and Jean-Paul’s regular visit from Mauritius to see their children and grandchildren. It’s a time for Adrian and me to catch up with his brother and sister and their spouses without all the usual distractions of busy lives and we fall into an easy routine of outings, meals and extended chats over breakfast. It’s a testament to the higher temperatures that almost all of us swim in the sea. It’s a first.
Then we train up to London to meet the extended family for the National Youth Orchestra’s Prom concert. Our great-nephew (and Debby and Jean-Paul’s grandson), Louis, is playing bassoon in the hundred and sixty strong orchestra. It’s a huge success and, according to a woman I chat to on the tube, the best the NYO have ever played. Adès, the conductor, has the young musicians play his own composition ‘Purgatoria’ and it’s utterly gripping.
We spend the night at our son, Alex’s, London house, although he himself is in Belfast helping his wife, Lia, to settle into her new home. She is about to take up a new professorial job at Queens University and jointly they are embarking on a change of lifestyle, commuting between the two cities. Next day, we enjoy ourselves shopping in the local International Supermarket, leave food in the house for Alex’s return, and then head off to the National Gallery. For two hours, we lose ourselves in centuries of art and revel in the air-conditioning.
As we join the masses at Beachy Head to watch the sun eclipsed, I remember that 80s song of Bonnie Tyler’s – Total Eclipse of the Heart – with which I had a brief emotional flirtation. That’s relationships for you. Apparently Bonnie has just died, eclipsed by mortality. The sun’s show over, we gather our things and start walking back home, zipping across the carpark and road where hundreds of cars are stuck in a jam. It’ll be like this for the next four days, while Eastbourne hosts its annual Airbourne, the noisiest show in town.
As the jets roar overhead and block out conversation, I remember the words of a friend’s mother and I find myself calling them out to the sky. A pianist is asking the dementia patients in her care home for song requests. Her response? ‘Oh, go ‘ome.’