The sun, that great celestial arsonist, has turned its full attention to the continent. Portugal, that lovely slipper of a country on the Iberian foot, has smashed its May temperature record with the casual brutality of a drunk punter kicking over a deckchair. The mercury hit a face-melting 36.
1 degrees in Mora, a place that sounds like a yoga pose but is actually a furnace. This is not weather. This is a climate tantrum.
Meanwhile, the rest of Europe is sweating through its linen like a politician remembering a promise. The UK, ever the dithering nanny, has its grid on high alert. The National Grid, that great spiderweb of fraying copper and wishful thinking, is testing its resilience.
Resilience against what? A few extra kettles? The sheer cheek of a warm breeze?
We are a nation that panics when the thermostat nudges past 25. We cancel trains. We parade hosepipes like holy relics.
But now, with the continent sizzling, our poor little island grid is bracing for an influx of desperately sweaty tourists, all demanding air conditioning and cold G&Ts. The irony is thick enough to spread on toast. The same sun that warms our bones is melting our infrastructure.
The record in Portugal is not a cause for celebration. It is a warning flare. A flare fired from a very hot gun.
The grid is tested, but the real test is whether we can look at these numbers and see not a statistic but a symptom. A symptom of a planet that is running a fever. And we are all sitting here, sweating, waiting for the bill to arrive.
