Dec 8, 2002
How You Feeling? (Hot, Hot, Hot)
Last night Brian Eno saved my life.
For reasons best known only to themselves, the property management company responsible for my flat last year gave all the woodwork in the place a lick of paint – including all the sash windows – which was very nice of them, we thought, until we realised that they had painted them all shut.
Half the windows at the back of the property don’t open, and every single window at the front is sealed firmly shut with white gloss, with the hardly-worth-mentioning-at-all-because-it-makes-sod-all-difference-frankly exception of the left hand window in my bedroom, which is actually painted open. About half an inch. Negligible airflow, I can assure you.
In March, when we moved in, closed windows were not an issue. The cold of a London spring (snow, sleet, wind) combined with the cold of a house which hadn’t been lived in for two years (and which, prior to that, had been inhabited by religious loonies, though that hasn’t been known to affect ambient temperature, except in extreme cases – c.f. The Exorcist) meant that it was pretty chilly, and as a result, having the windows shut was, frankly, marvellous.
Not so in April, when the first few days of sunshine began to creep in, and when we had our first party. Suddenly, we realised, the living room was very difficult to air out, and my bed was uncomfortable at night. That is to say, I realised the bit about my bed. We’re not that kind of household, thankyouverymuch.
The last week has been hell. Sweaty, humid, unpleasant hell. (As opposed, presumably, to the cool-waves-lapping-on-the-beach kind of hell, which religious loonies don’t often tell us about, for obvious reasons)
Remember ages ago when I wrote about getting a new alarm clock? One that had the loudest beep in the world? Well, these days, I don’t need it anymore – at least, not to wake me up, as I tend to wake myself up fighting with the duvet long before dawn (how does it manage to radiate more heat than a nuclear reactor? How?) or berating my S.O. for hogging all the oxygen. These days, my main use for my uber-alarmclock is to note the climbing temperature of my room, and weep silent, hot, salty tears of frustration in the wee small hours.
Last night, at about half nine, despite the twirling of two fans (on opposite sides of the room, on full blast – I’m aiming to create a vortex above the bed, which I’m hoping will suck me into oblivion at 4am one of these mornings. As long as oblivion is sort of cool.) the ambient temperature of my room reached a horrifying 37 degrees – that’s in the high nineties, in old money. Bleargh. They should be passing out bottled water at the door, I swear.
When I lived in Seville in 1995, I can distinctly remember sweltering inside (except I didn’t, really, because Moorish/Andalucian architecture is so brilliant at climate control that you often can’t tell how hot it is until you leave the shady recesses of the house – I’d usually have to leave the house twice every morning; once to check the temperature, and then again five minutes and a change of clothes later, for good) on a particularly hot day, listening to a local radio station. The presenter was going on about how hot it was that day – 44 degrees, and still only the end of May – when he struck upon a plan.
About fifty miles outside Seville is an area known as the frying pan of Spain, because all heat seems to concentrate there, ferociously. In the middle of this furnace is a small dusty town. The radio DJ called up a random resident of the town, and asked her if she would check her patio thermometer – every good Spanish household has at least one thermometer knocking around. She said okay and toddled off to look. After a minute of dead air, she bimbled back, picked up the phone and announced, deadpan “It says fifty three degrees”
You could almost hear the whole of Seville heave a massive sigh of relief: somewhere else was hotter. In contrast, we suddenly felt cool. Positively balmy, in fact.
So last night, I struck upon my own fiendish plan. Before I went to bed, I had a freezing cold shower, and then I lay on the bed in the dark, and listened to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports as the fans swooshed cool air over me. I let the music drift me away to another place – a cooler place – and I blocked out my frustrations about work, home, weather, everything, and just listened instead, for a while. I was asleep in no time.
Thank you, Brian. You rock (in a kind of quiet, ambient way).
