Hot, Hot, Hot

Well, yesterday turned out to be the hardest day of this entire heat wave. The temperature got to 96º F (or 36º C), and there was very little air movement. Everything was dead still. The world was a slow-bake oven.

Experts officially declared this the worst heat wave Europe has ever experienced, with temperatures that would have been "virtually impossible" 50 years ago. Climate change is thought to be at the root of it, of course. The UK broke its hottest June temperature record for the third day in a row.

I did take a walk in the morning, but by midday I was so desperate that Dave and I decided to find a cool retreat. We first went to the public library because we had to pick up our new library cards -- but the library has no central air conditioning! They had a couple of portable air conditioners placed strategically around the room, but the exhaust vent hoses were also in the room, so while one side of each machine was blowing cool air, the other was blowing a stiflingly hot blast. The net gain was zero. We got out of there.

We went instead to Cafe Nero, which did have properly installed and functioning air-conditioning, and thank goodness. We found a table and got some coffees and sat there for about four hours, going over all our options for our cruise next month. We decided on some excursions for the days we're in port, and that was by far the happiest part of the day. I felt like a kettle that had been taken off the heat, with the steam pouring out of my ears gradually diminishing. After Dave left I stayed another hour or so to read blogs.

In the morning I finished Rebecca Solnit's book "The Beginning Comes After the End," which was a thought-provoking and ultimately optimistic look at our current global political strife. Rather than fixating on the rise of the cruel, inept and authoritarian leaders who seem to occupy the world stage today, Solnit wants us to step back and look at the bigger picture -- the ground that has been gained in society over the last century, the respect now widely shown to formerly maligned groups like Native Americans and LGBTQ+ people, the greater understanding and appreciation for the rights of animals and nature, the gains of the Civil Rights era that have reshaped all our views and expectations.

Today's backlash is the inevitable reaction to all that progress, and is essentially the dying gasp of the old power structure, she says. "Cruelty, greed and division are not new, but when the old order that institutionalized them is threatened, its beneficiaries come out fighting to hold onto advantages that used to go unquestioned," she wrote. (That sentence made me immediately think of Elon Musk.)

And as she put it in another part of the book, though individual rights can be legally curtailed, the idea of those rights can't be killed. Entire generations have grown up in the environment of earlier political gains, of slow but essentially revolutionary change, and we all see the world through that lens. As Solnit puts it, "You can cut down the flowers, but you can't stop the spring. There is no going back, though how we go forward is the work -- or conflict -- at hand."

Or, as she quotes writer Anand Giridharadas, "When I look down at the ground of the present right now, I feel depressed. If I lift my head to the horizon, I see a different picture. This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something."

God, I hope so.

Solnit also made the interesting observation, and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, that conservatives who see the world through a lens of individuality and isolated achievement are less understanding of systems -- of the interconnection between all living things, and all people and parts of society and economic groups. Rather than perceiving that web of existence, they see only their pinprick selves moving through a universe of resources (including other humans) to be taken and manipulated at will. This is why right-wingers disdain talk of climate change, because the Earth's climate is the ultimate system. When Margaret Thatcher famously declared "there is no society," she was displaying that inability to perceive interconnectedness.

Last night was awful. When I went to bed at 10 p.m. the temperature was 80º F (27º C) and that is just not good sleeping weather. We have an oscillating fan, but it doesn't do much in an airless room. I couldn't fall asleep until after midnight, after I went out and sat on the garden bench just to cool off in the darkness. (It may have been 80º outside but that's cooler than the temperatures inside the house.) I seriously considered sleeping in the garden, but I didn't want to wake up with a rat nibbling my toes.

Instead I came inside, spread out on the living room floor beneath our largest window, and fell asleep there. I woke up around 2:30 a.m. and moved to the bedroom, which was more tolerable by then.

Still warm today, up to the high 80's or about 31º C, but we've had some rain and it's overcast, and all of this really is coming to an end. For now.