Furnace Friday bingo: nine things that will definitely happen during today's heatwave meltdown
Normally at this stage of an article we outline its context, but you already know it is hot. It is so very, very hot. You can feel it in the air, which is the temperature and texture of freshly served treacle. You can feel it in your bones, which run through your sweltering flesh like a kebab shop's rotating pole runs through its cylinder of sweating meat.
Say your prayers: it is Furnace Friday, probably the hottest day of the year so far, definitely the hottest day of the universe’s 13.8bn-year existence. You know it is hot, and you know it is going to stay hot, and you know there is nothing left to do except cower in the glare of our white-hot sun and wait for the flames to consume you. Well, there is one thing left: Furnace Friday bingo! Here are some inevitabilities to look out for as you burn like a log in a fire.
1. The easiest small talk of your life
“How are you?”; “How are you doing?”; “How’s life?”; etc. The answers, now, are always “Hot”; “Badly”; and “Over soon, God willing.”
2. Unprecedentedly widespread public transport failure
British public transport gets a lot of flak for being able to operate solely within a narrow, Goldilocksy zone of temperate weather. However, given that the roads are literally melting, surely we can cut public transport some slack on this occasion?
Think on this as you listen to the station manager explain to a platform of roasting commuters that none of you are going home this evening.
3. Some incredibly messed-up fatberg stuff
Most of the time, London’s fatbergs remain in the realm over which they preside: the dank sewers into which we pour our effluence, our baby wipes, our cooking oil, our sins. An uneasy human–fatberg truce allows us, the humans, to retain control of the surface, and them, fatbergs, the oily nemeses we created, to reign over the deep.
But for how long will this dark bargain protect us? I fear that the heat, slowly spreading into the Earth, will wake the monsters that lie beneath us. I fear the March of the Fatbergs.
4. A birth rate blip in nine months' time
How can you touch another human being in this heat? How can you come within a metre radius of another hot-breathed, sticky-limbed, heat-emitting being? You can't, because you would die. Both of you would die. Mark my words: there will be no babies born on April 27, 2019.
5. Some plonker taking a thermometer on the London Underground
Oh yeah! We did that!
6. A dramatic and unsustainable shift in the nation’s diet
I don’t understand how anyone can eat anything apart from salad, fruit and ice cream. I don’t understand how anyone can drink anything that hasn’t been pulled out of a fridge <1 second earlier. Even the tap water is basically warm enough to make tea with.
7. A generation of dress code heroes
Vilified in our time, yet destined to be revered by our ancestors. We are the suffragettes of our day, the 21st century's answer to Gandhi. We are the men who've worn shorts to work today. One day soon, our pale calves will be immortalised in marble sculpture.
8. The end of grass
How can it come back from this? How? We will have to Astroturf our public spaces. An eternity of turf burn beckons.
9. Home air-con unit chicken
The only thing that gets me through this daily agony is a little thing called hope. Hope that one day it might cool down. Hope that one morning I’ll walk to the station without having to avoid, like an abominable vampire cockroach, the parts of the route most afflicted by direct sunlight. It’s this hope, unfortunately, that will be my doom, because it’s what’s preventing me (and you? I refuse to believe I am the only one) from buying the domestic air conditioning unit that I so desperately need. I just know deep within me that the universe will not allow me to spend £100 on one of these things without immediately halting the heatwave out of pure spite. Which on one hand, would be a good and desirable thing… and on the other, would leave me £100+ down.
When do we accept defeat and spend the money? I have no idea.
