Apologies for my prolonged absence from this blog - heat, health and deadlines are to blame

I had a deadline brought forward on me two weeks ago, which resulted in spending three oppressively hot days slogging away at a review (see previous post) in my sweat-box of a study at the top of the house. As a result, I got to experience first-hand the delights of serious chronic fatigue, as opposed to the  relatively moderate version I normally suffer from: instead of waking up with only 25% of my normal energy supply, I was waking up with between 1% and 5%: one morning it took me almost an hour to summon sufficient oomph just to get out of bed (a common enough problem at university, I remember, but I'm now 65 and retired and I actually like getting out of bed). After a few days...

...I did finally manage to make it up to my office under the eaves, but that was all a bit:

via GIPHY

...so I shuffled back downstairs, sharpish (or as sharpish as I could manage at the time).

I keep reading references to 1976, which, as I don't really remember it being particularly bad, I'd always dismissed it as a bit of an urban myth. And yet it was, apparently, hotter for longer (18 days over 30°C on the trot) than this year has has been so far. How is that possible? I was living in Westbourne Terrace in Bayswater and working in Holborn and commuting on the hottest of all tube lines - the dreaded Central. It was before office air-conditioning had been invented (in Britain, at least), and owning a fan in a private dwelling was still a sure sign of sexual deviancy. I was wearing stupendously sweaty nylon shirts and underpants and man-made fibre suits (!),  and wearing my hair a lot longer that I do now. I was a publicity wallah for a publishing company, and most days would find me schmoozing bibulous journalists over boozy three-hour lunches in baking hot restaurants, I was smoking 40 Benson & Hedges a day, and I was several stone overweight...

Yet I don't remember feeling in the least distressed. Does being 23 really make things that easy? I suppose it does. 

Anyway, thank you for your emails expressing concern - I'm genuinely touched. After two days of respite, the heat is due to start cranking up again tomorrow, so, even if my energy levels keep rising, I won't be returning to normal blogging duties for a while - but will be posting stuff now and then. The only good thing about this enforced hiatus has been not feeling compelled to write about Brexit - in fact, not having the strength to pay any sort of attention to the current state of British politics, which is all rather depressing (I was starting to hallucinate in any case - I honestly imagined reading that Billy Bragg had warned British Jews that they had some work to do to repair their severely tarnished reputation with the Labour Party!). 

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine a host of idiotic, self-important busybodies  banging on about how the government really must get on with devising strategies for dealing with these long hot summers as they become more frequent in future. The fact that our media has devoted so much space to this sort of ludicrous, irrational, superstitious drivel is positive proof that "climate change" has taken on all the characteristics of a religious cult, and that, if you stop believing in Christianity, you don't believe in nothing - you start believing in anything. Perhaps we should hold mass, state-organised human sacrifices to appease the angry, vengeful god of the Jet Stream! If I have another ten days like the ten I've just been through, I would like to volunteer to be amongst the first wave of victims - as long as the ceremony is held somewhere really cold. And Billy Bragg is right behind me in the queue.