So yesterday was a particularly hot night and the house was filled with warm air as it had been unoccupied for several days. Even with the window wide open, I felt it was too hot for me to get to sleep so I promptly came downstairs and spent a couple of hours on the sofa in our downstairs lounge which was both comfortable and a lot cooler than upstairs. So this little trick worked but I also have a fan available which I might press into use but the hot weather may only last for a few days. Before I went away, I emptied my fridges of food and anything that might go ‘off’ so I have returned home to the unusual (for me) experience of a house with no readily available food within it. But a trip down to my local Waitrose will soon remedy that but I am without a car for a week until my son and I have our new car arrangements sorted out between us. Having drank some excellent, locally brewed dark beer in Harrogate, a phrase is running around in my head which is ‘Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy’ While it is commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin (one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first postmaster general), he never actually said or wrote those exact words. He did, however, express a similar sentiment about wine and the quote about beer is often and wrongly attributed to him. Nonetheless, occasionally one sees it written across fun tee-shirts and the like. Although in general I do not like slogans on tee-shirts, I did see one on a very corpulent and evidently overweight Englishman in Southern Spain which read ‘Help me in my fight against anorexia’ which was amusing in its way. Now that I am returned from Spain, my exercise regime should start in earnest but I must say that the very hot weather disinclines one towards exercise of any sort. By the post this morning, I received several documents all of which were tidying loose ends after Meg’s death. I received news that the DVLA no longer regarded Meg as the official keeper of her ex-Motability vehicle, the local council had sent me a revised schedule of council tax repayments (which happens to be the same as before) and the relevant death and marriage certificates had been returned from the Teachers’ Pension Agency and are were now on file.
After breakfast, I walked down into town but on my way down I was joined by a near neighbour and I must say that I had to walk fairly fast to keep up with him. We chatted about a beer stall that he was running to be part of the forthcoming Bromsgrove festival and I might just be temped to go along to it. Then I had my normal hot chocolate and early morning repast and was joined by one of my regulars (the other finding the weather altogether too hot in which to venture out) After we had chatted a bit, I had espied Seasoned World Traveller but he was disinclined to chat together because I think he used the pub as a sort of office and was evidently in the middle of something. I called in at Waitrose only to find that all the copies of ‘The Times’ had already been sold so I had to purchase a copy of ‘the I’ I also took the opportunity to buy some essential supplies which included some of my favourite non-alcoholic beer which I know they stock. As I walked up the hill with two shopping bags full of shopping, I rang the doorbell of my Irish friends and was delighted to be invited and to share a cold drink with them in their garden. With my trip to Yorkshire and my friend’s recent operation, we had a lot to chat about but then , as predicted there were large splats of rain and we feel with the heat that a thunderstorm might well be imminent. My friend ran me home for which I was well and truly grateful and I lunched on a tin of sardines and some prepared salad which I had just purchased. Then I watched some outdated comedy programs on an obscure channel before thinking about getting things ready for my attendance at church this evening.
It was so hot yesterday that the weather authorities are putting out warnings about the danger of hot weather to old people and those with compromised immune systems. A study has just been published which uses decades of UK data to understand risk relationships in 34,753 areas across England and Wales to predict the excess mortality during this heatwave. Overall, about 570 excess deaths are expected to occur during the heatwave, the researchers estimate, with 114 on Thursday, 152 on Friday, 266 on Saturday when temperatures peak above 32°C and 37 excess deaths on Sunday when they fall to the mid-twenties. Older people above 65 are expected to be hardest hit, with 488 of the estimated excess deaths. Of these, 314 are expected to be among people aged 85 and over, the researchers found. The result shows how heatwaves can be deadly for people with underlying health conditions such as heart problems, diabetes, and respiratory issues, as high temperatures put extra stress on their already compromised immune systems, the researchers say. The horrible thought flashed across my mind whether Meg might have been caught up in this wave of unrelated deaths. I think this is unlikely because I would have deployed our fan and other methods to keep the temperature down. But the possibility remains that as her bodily defences progressively weakened as the weeks went by, she might have become another unwitting casualty, about which I would have felt pretty awful. In the evening, my son has kindly consented to running me to church for the evening service that starts at 6.00pm. This will be in stark contrast to what happened last week when I stepped out of the car only to realise that I had no car to transport me to church (but a local taxi form I have used in the past obliged very quickly on that occasion)