All three of us eased ourselves gently into the steam bath of the day. A changed world ñ a brassy sun boring through the middle of the sky; desert heat haze flickering above the tarmac of the tree-lined road; blitzed heat-struck pigeons reeling across the front lawn.
In the living room we turned on the two fans. They merely stirred the warm, soupy air. Reuben crawled around listlessly like a little frog too far from water as we prepared to go into Hitchin for supplies for the trip to Bristol. Taking deep breaths we lurched through the thick midday heat & into the Volvo.
The town was surprisingly crowded for a weekday. As well as stocking up we had to buy Emís brother a birthday present so went to Boots the Chemist to see if we could find a home-brew beer kit, as requested. We stepped through the automatic doors (which opened with a sharp intake of breath like the doors on the Enterprise) & into the exquisite caress of air conditioning. Normally I canít get out Boots quick enough: I am impervious to the allure of hair removing creams, makeup packs in little baskets & sandwiches which cost as much as a three-course meal. But this time it was I who lingered by the lipstick counter looking out into the street at passers-by floating like tropical fish in the shimmering haze.
We had lunch at Cafe Rouge (un-air conditioned) & 10-month-old Reuben smiled brilliantly at the waitresses & watched their bums as they walked away. Em then went off to have most of her long auburn hair cut off at Toni & Guy while I was to wander around town with Reuben for an hour.
What could have been an hour of unendurable length actually went very well. Reuben was feeling gregarious& flirtatious & I was able to visit all the charity shops looking for classy shirts ñ a certainty in a bourgeois burg like Hitchin - & came away with a couple of Ben Shermans. It was only when we got to W.H. Smith that things began to come apart at the seams. We had 20 minutes or so to spare. There were some empty benches on the wide Regency-built pavement so we luxuriated for 10 minutes in air conditioning so cool that the staff all had red noses & colds. I bought a copy of Mojo & the dayís Independent & sat down with a remarkably compliant Reuben, mellowed by his extensive socialising.
I got no further than the headline: AS TEMPERATURES SOAR, ONE MAN CAN TAKE THE HEAT OFF. It seems in essence that Vladimir Putin is delaying ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. He may actually decide not to sign it. Russia may join the United States in refusing to ratify & then comply with the requirements of one of the most extraordinary international agreements ever drawn up. These two nations ñ one, the mightiest on earth, the other still a premier player ñ may, through their inaction, take on responsibility for the most cataclysmic environmental events since the passing of the dinosaurs. I repeat the matter of the news item thus not to patronise the reader but to try to capture my incredulity on that bench outside W.H. Smith in Hitchin High Street as the world around me receded & a vision of something nightmarishly alternative took its place.
Sure, I knew all this stuff before. We all did. We all do. Weíve read it in our newspapers & journals. Weíve been told it by scientists from all over the world - not wild-eyed, wild-haired conspiracy theorists but serious men & women talking in quiet voices. Weíve studied the charts & the computer models. Weíve looked up into deep blue, cloudless skies, loosened our collars & tried to remember when last there was a sequence of summer days that were quite this hot.
And suddenly a lazy, overheated day in Hitchin with my partner & my son seemed something of an irrelevancy. I looked down at Reuben slumped in his pushchair, watching the sluggish pedestrians trudging past, & wondered, in time-honoured fashion, what kind of world he would inherit from his lazy, short-sighted, ideologically-fatigued, wilfully ignorant, ultimately suicidal mentors.
