There’s nothing horrifying about a heatwave

Looking through the window at Hove seafront on Tuesday morning, as the wind whistled round my apartment building and the white horses chased each other up the shingle, I wondered what became of the heatwave we had all been warned about a few days before. From where I was sitting (and England’s south coast is generally the most clement part of Blighty), this alleged heatwave comprised two muggy afternoons, a thunderstorm and then back to business as usual on the morning after the longest day of the year.

Still, no doubt we’ll be told by the Met Office that those few unremarkable days rivalled the summer of 1976, when forest fires rampaged and reservoirs dried out, revealing the drowned villages beneath. Last year, I think there were around two good weeks of sunshine, but that hasn’t stopped the official recorders from telling us that 2024 was the hottest year on record.

Indeed, the green propagandists at the Met Office warned in December last year: ‘The outlook for 2025 suggests that it is likely to be one of the three warmest years for global average temperature, falling in line just behind 2024 and 2023. The major contribution to the warming is the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases.’

Others may recall last summer somewhat differently. Frankly, it was a washout. As recalled by Kirsty McCabe of the Royal Meteorological Society: ’It hasn’t felt like “summer” because we’ve been in a chilly airmass with cool northerly winds. Cool enough that we’ve been digging out our jumpers and tempted to turn the heating back on.’

I certainly can’t have been looking at the same sky this week as my erstwhile playmate, Zoe ‘Chuckles’ Williams, whose Guardian column earlier this week came with the headline: ‘Why do we pretend heatwaves are fun – and ignore the brutal, burning reality?’ The last time I saw her, we were dancing on a banquette to a live performance of the Scissor Sisters in a nightclub, which no doubt these days she’d find a reason not to. Those banquettes are plastic!

To be fair, Chuckles knows how she’s viewed. ‘I think I must be on someone’s Rolodex of killjoys’, she sighed heavily in the piece, ‘because whenever something good happens – schools break up, summer holidays start, the weather’s nice, it’s Christmas, it’s Easter – I get a call from a talk radio show asking if I’ll come on and explain why that’s bad, actually’.

Heatwaves were recently on Chuckles’s horizon, and she willingly took the LBC shilling in return for scolding listeners about how: ‘Heatwaves aren’t a treat, they’re a problem. We have to do more than just ready our infrastructure for the more intense temperatures to come: we have to bring our narrative a bit closer to reality.’

But she then appeared to suffer a – heat-induced? – hallucination as she wrote her column:

‘I couldn’t help but notice the heatwave media formula, and how extravagantly weird it is. It starts a few days before, as soon as the Met Office gives us all a heads up, and is illustrated with either a stock photo of an ice cream, or a chart of graphics in which the sun is always smiling and sometimes has his hat on. As the heat begins, images pour in as they happen: kids splashing in a fountain, heaving beaches. It’s like illustrating a war with a photo of a soldier coming home and kissing his sweetheart: sure, that must happen to some people, eventually, but it is not most people’s lived reality of war.’

But if we’re talking ‘lived reality’, then we can’t just talk about the bad stuff, as Williams wants to. We also need to talk about the people whose spirits are lifted when the sun comes out, making the difference between a depressed day and a merry one. My reaction when I see the sun – even though I can no longer go on the beach or swim in the sea, two of my great pleasures in life, now beyond my reach as a cripple – is instinctively to feel perkier, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this outrageous behaviour.

Is Chuckles kidding about the media treating a sunny weekend as some sort of impromptu fiesta? On the contrary, especially on the BBC, you can’t get away from the meteorological equivalent of a Three Minute Warning. Red-for-danger maps, warnings to stay inside as though the nuclear bomb has dropped, pleas to check on elderly neighbours… and, of course, the endless brainwashing about ‘staying hydrated’.

We’re used to newsreaders acting like they’re our mums, but the other day an actual cheeky beggar sitting outside the mini-mart shouted out cheerily to me: ‘STAY HYDRATED!’ I think my mild dislike of Harry and Meghan coalesced into actual hatred when they claimed that one of Archie’s first words was ‘hydrate’. As someone who’s lucky enough to wear a permanent internal catheter, ‘staying hydrated’ is especially important for me. But even I, as part of the disabled community (I knew I’d get to join a ‘community’ one day!), am sceptical.

When I was growing up, a glass of water was something you gave someone when they’d had a shock, perhaps with a couple of Anadin, and we were a robust bunch of blighters. Maybe it’s all this ‘staying hydrated’ lark that’s contributing to all the water shortages and imminent rationing we keep hearing about?

Still, Chuckles’s piece gives us even more reason to fret: ‘High temperatures are much more dangerous when you’re disabled, when you’re homeless, when you’re incarcerated, when you’re old.’ Now, I’m two of these, and if you count the ‘heatwave’ weekend when my lift broke down, leaving me up in the sky for three days, I claim a hat-trick. So Zoe, stay in your lane, you ableist white saviour, you.

Of course, even if the alleged climate crisis was sorted out tomorrow, I’d hazard that Guardian writers would still fall short of being a barrel of laughs. I reckon that someone who has issues with a lovely image of a homecoming soldier kissing his missus is determined to feel bad, come what may.

As with anti-Semitism and misogyny, misery is one of those qualities that appears to have migrated from the right to the left, paradoxically making the terms increasingly meaningless. One used to think of right-wing people being moaners and left-wing people running around having crazy sex with each other between demos (see the young Jeremy Corbyn taking some comrades home to display a naked young Diane Abbott under his duvet). Even DH Lawrence, who could be a right old belly-acher, once wrote:

‘If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,
don’t do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.’

If a revolution looked like being fun these days, the left would refuse to get involved, dismissing it as a bourgeois deviation.

I recall in the 1980s writing a piece in the Face magazine called ‘Apocalypse Now (Please)’, about a group of people I christened ‘Amockalypsists’ – sad-sacks who believed that The End Is Nigh, but came at this from a secular, liberal viewpoint as opposed to a religious one. Martin Amis was the most insistent. There was something creepy about them, as if they were willing things to be beastly because it behoves an artist to live in interesting times.

I get that feeling now when seeing over-heated reports about the weather. It’s rude to speculate on what turns people on, but I always got the impression that Chicken Licken was a bit of a freak who was kind of thrilled by the idea of the sky falling on its head. Reading the Guardian on the horror of heatwaves, it’s reassuring, if a bit of a downer, to know that the calamity fans are still with us.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, Notes from the Naughty Step, here.