Dead Weather

I love this time of the year. I'd stick my neck out and say that May and June are my favourite months of the year, especially when the weather is nice. We've had almost three consecutive weeks of nice weather - sunny skies and temperatures hovering between 19 and 21 degrees. I got a tan and I've had shorts on for most of that time. 

However, with Saturday the 10th of June came the arrival of not so nice weather. Many would call it glorious and frankly we have to put up with enough cold, wet and windy days to make a few days of stinky hot weather worth the effort to stick with. I'm no longer a fan of it though, although I'm of the opinion that I've never really been a huge fan, even in the days when I'd willingly lay on a sun lounger and absorb UV like some sentient solar panel. The problem is the weekend is just the start of it, we have at least another week of temperatures above 25° with high humidity; that's a bit scary.

I should point out that in June 2018, Galloway experienced some fantastic weather, with the temperature over parts of the Machars reaching almost 32° but the thing about that was the lack of humidity. There is photographic evidence of me swimming in the Solway Firth on the hottest day of the year. It wasn't the most pleasant thing I've ever done but it was exhilarating and I'm glad I did it as I can't see myself doing it ever again (but more for health reasons than because I'm a wuss).

The thing is, I'm doing something. When the temperature gets so hot it's unpleasant simply walking in it then you're going to struggle to find something that occupies your time that doesn't involved subjecting yourself to it. However, I think I need to explain something about Galloway first and how acclimatisation has changed the way my body reacts to temperatures...

The wife always used to be amazed by how women in Newcastle could wander around on the coldest of winter nights with barely a stitch of clothing on, but we soon had an answer to that when we'd lived here for a couple of years. You acclimatise to the temperature and very quickly. This is going to seem strange, but when I lived in Northampton 6° was, as they say up here, 'kin Baltic, but 6° in Scotland is almost going out without a hat on weather now. If we get winter temps between 8 and 10° I will have my hat with me but unless it's really windy I won't wear it, the same can be said when the temp is below freezing - if it's bright, sunny and no wind you can almost get away with an autumn jacket, not that I'd want to try that now. The point is 25° used to be pleasant down south, but it's like 30° up here, so imagine what the temps in excess of 40° last year would have been like? Up here people think 18° is 'just about right,' so 40° would kill them, myself included.

I can be a great procrastinator at the best of times, the irony is when the weather is too hot I want to do stuff that takes my mind off of the heat (and my breathing). Usually that might involve watching football, but the domestic football season is over until the middle of August and I'm not a huge watcher of summer sport, I even find golf difficult to 'get into' since it's become a chore to try and watch it. So I usually read a book or two, but I've done that already and I could read something else, nothing in my extensive collection tickles my fancy and neither do anything I'm yet to own. I even thought about reading some of the few remaining comics I have, but I got bored with that very quickly and suddenly started to worry when a casual search for the specific edition I had been reading informed me that it is worth in excess of £500.

Obviously television tends to be full of repeats and sport this time of the year, there isn't a huge amount of films coming out and we don't have an easily-accessible family-friendly pub any longer so you can't even drink yourself into oblivion. I've tried diving down Tube of You rabbit holes, that used to be so easy to do when the weather wasn't hot, but now seem to be full of stuff I've seen or things I have no interest in. I mean, I watched a 30 second clip of Brett Goldstein talking about Roy Kent and now I'm inundated on a daily basis with ted Lasso recommendations. I suppose I could pass my time by clicking Do Not Recommend and hoping the Tube of You takes notice of me. 

I have been listening to music again, probably for the first time in over a year. It was ... disappointing, or at least that's what I started to feel about music. The last three or four years have seen very few things I've raved about and I started to think that music had finally left me behind. Within the space of a month, two albums came out that blew me away - Fantasy by M83 and United Wire by North Atlantic Oscillation - the problem is while it has reignited my love of music, I'm not playing anything else but these two albums. It's almost an OCD in it's persistence. Therefore I'm not seeing music as a reliever of my boredom.

I've recently found Radio UK on the internet, this allows me access to just about every digital radio station available and while I have been immersing myself in talk radio again of late, it's all a bit dull. It feels like it's going through the motions and I haven't found a music station that can hit an average of better than 1 in every 5 records I might not mind. Radio isn't my hot weather salvation.

The stupid thing is that the last eight months have largely been lost, either through illness, recuperation or having something prevent me from doing as much as I used to. I'm writing more blogs, but even that feels like a copout - surely I should be writing something worthwhile? The wife has been doing loads in the garden and I'm not being much help and the irony is had the weather not been as hot I probably still wouldn't have been doing much more than sitting in my office writing a blog about how bored I am in the weather...