A streetcar named routemaster
It’s hot and sultry. Cotton sticks to the sweaty backs of thighs, men fan themselves with hats, clothes crumple and wrinkle and it becomes nearly impossible to hold a decent crease. Big girls show damp patches. People who have rushed for their train make ‘plip’ noises as sweat drops from their nose to the floor of the carriage. All we need is alcoholism and homosexuality and it’d be a bloody Tennessee Williams play out there.
The population has divided up into the usual camps. Those who see any variation in temperature as an inconvenience and insist on wearing their vest, shirt, pullover and tweeds summer and winter, those that have a summer wardrobe and a winter wardrobe (the summer wardrobe is the one with the bottle of ‘fakatan’ in the bottom of it) and those who celebrate the mercury going up like a stallion on viagra by removing their shirt.
In response to days of brutal, almost Mediterranean temperatures (how one misses a pool and a bar and somebody to serve beer and salty snacks at these times) I have put away the winter woollies and donned my summer plumage, the lighter linens and cottons being so much easier to wring out after travelling on the train wearing them.
The days of shorts in the office are, sad to report, over. A pity, as my calves have rarely looked better (solid muscle covered with a coarse hair that is not so much pelt as bracken-type undergrowth) but when one gets to a certain age, one is not so much perceived as leading fashion as losing faculties. Added to which the air-con in the office has been turned up so high that it’s rumoured somebody in the canteen had to be treated for frostbite. Rumours of an arse-print being found in a tub of ice-cream remain unconfirmed.
The population has divided up into the usual camps. Those who see any variation in temperature as an inconvenience and insist on wearing their vest, shirt, pullover and tweeds summer and winter, those that have a summer wardrobe and a winter wardrobe (the summer wardrobe is the one with the bottle of ‘fakatan’ in the bottom of it) and those who celebrate the mercury going up like a stallion on viagra by removing their shirt.
In response to days of brutal, almost Mediterranean temperatures (how one misses a pool and a bar and somebody to serve beer and salty snacks at these times) I have put away the winter woollies and donned my summer plumage, the lighter linens and cottons being so much easier to wring out after travelling on the train wearing them.
The days of shorts in the office are, sad to report, over. A pity, as my calves have rarely looked better (solid muscle covered with a coarse hair that is not so much pelt as bracken-type undergrowth) but when one gets to a certain age, one is not so much perceived as leading fashion as losing faculties. Added to which the air-con in the office has been turned up so high that it’s rumoured somebody in the canteen had to be treated for frostbite. Rumours of an arse-print being found in a tub of ice-cream remain unconfirmed.
3 Comments:
I'm really curious to know what you consider "hot".
We don’t have climate as you know it, we have weather. This means it can be hot hot hot one day and c-c-c-c-cold the next.
I could talk about temperatures and so on, but let me put it this way: It was so hot that at six in the morning you could smell the dew evaporating off of the grass and flowers, bringing up the perfume of the plants with it. Half an hour later and that bouquet was gone, replaced by the smell of dust. In the sun, you started to sweat while outside you could smell the dust and dirt baking for hour after hour - the sunlight made you blink and wince, so strong you could feel it heating your bones, so bright that pupils became pinpricks and people with Botox’d faces regretted not being able to screw up their faces in a prolonged squint. At night the curtains hang lank against open windows and not a breath of air stirs.
That was the weekend, it’s been pissing down for the last few days. Situation normal.
Now, I suppose you’re going to start a response ‘call that hot - when I lived in Florida the oranges would spontaneously combust, when I lived in Texas we could sometimes barely brave the sunlight long enough for a barbeque/cattle russling session/lynchin’ delete as appropriate’.
Well, you were almost correct...I was just going to call you a wimp.
The humidity here is what makes it unbearable at times...Georgia is not as bad as Texas, Florida at least has a breeze on the beach. I like to think that's why women in the South have fewer wrinkles though so I'm not complaining.
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