The mercury has soared to record highs across western Europe, and the British government, predictably, has ordered stress tests on our creaking infrastructure. This is the sort of news that would have made a Victorian engineer weep into his tea. We have become a nation that reacts to the weather rather than preparing for it.
The Romans built aqueducts that lasted centuries. We cannot even keep our railways from buckling under a bit of sun. This is not merely a matter of climate; it is a symptom of intellectual and institutional decay.
When a society loses its capacity for long-term planning, it descends into a cycle of crisis management. The heat wave is a mirror, and it shows us a people too comfortable, too decadent, to bother with the hard work of maintaining an empire. We have swapped ambition for convenience, and now we are paying the price in melted tarmac and cancelled trains.
The stress tests will likely confirm what we already know: that our infrastructure is a patchwork of negligence. But will anyone have the courage to propose a solution that goes beyond temporary fixes? I doubt it.
We are in the autumn of our civilisation, and the heat is only making the leaves fall faster.
