So here we are again. Europe, once the cradle of civilisation, is now a giant pizza oven, and the Brits are the ones burning on the crust. The mercury has hit levels that would make Nero blush, and the UK’s hospitals are preparing for a surge in what the limp-wristed modernists call ‘heat-related admissions.
’ In my day, we called it a Tuesday in the Raj. But never mind that. The real story, the one the Guardian will never print, is this: we have grown soft.
The Romans didn’t have air conditioning. The Victorians didn’t close schools because of a warm breeze. But here we are, a nation of whimpering thermophobes, buying up electric fans as if they were the last loaves of bread in a siege.
I half expect to see a headline: ‘Woman, 42, collapses after walking for ten minutes in non-air-conditioned Primark.’ Have we learned nothing from history? Heat waves are cyclical, like the fall of empires.
Rome fell because of decadence and lead pipes. We’ll fall because we’ve declared 30°C a national emergency. The NHS, already crumbling under the weight of its own bureaucracy, will now see accident and emergency wards filled with the dehydrated and the sun-stroked.
People who simply forgot to drink water. People who think that SPF 50 is a substitute for common sense. And what of the leadership?
The government will issue a ‘stay indoors’ advisory, a phrase that once meant ‘there is a Luftwaffe overhead’ and now means ‘you might get a bit of a tan.’ Meanwhile, the continent is equally hysterical. Italy has put out red alerts for every city except, presumably, those underwater.
Spain is advising citizens to avoid the sun between 11 a.m. and 5 p.
m. — as if the sun has ever respected office hours. It all smacks of a civilisation that has lost its nerve.
We used to conquer the world. Now we can’t conquer a heatwave without a thousand headlines and a parliamentary inquiry. The real issue, the one no one wants to discuss, is that we are in intellectual decline.
We have replaced resilience with risk assessment. We have swapped stoicism for victimhood. A heat wave is not a crisis.
It is a test of character. And we are failing spectacularly. So let the mercury rise.
Let the hospitals fill with those who forgot that liquids exist. I will be here, writing, sweating, but not complaining. For in the great cycle of history, the strong endure.
The weak buy ice packs from Boots.
