UK Media Keep On Presenting News Of Record-Breaking Heatwaves W. Happy Beach/Fountain Photos
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As something to be frightened of, it seemed to belong to another age: in the imperial era of The Four Feathers, heat was often what the British dreaded most in the territories they conquered or annexed, and for many years they coped with it rather badly. In 18th-century Bengal, for example, the combination of pre-monsoon heat and monsoon humidity was deathly, but the British stubbornly continued to eat, drink and dress as though they lived in Berkshire. Their behaviour makes a vivid historical study in gluttony, stupidity and dissipation of all kinds. They drank torrents of madeira, champagne, burgundy and claret; wolfed down soup, roast fowl, mutton pie, lamb, rice pudding, tarts and cheese at dinner (a meal consumed at two in the afternoon, the hottest time of day); pelted each other with bread rolls at supper; vomited from carriages; and fell drunkenly into ditches, soiling their topcoats and silk waistcoats, their lace sleeves and their breeches, the whole splendid apparel already wet with sweat.
Naturally, many of them died. The records for 1780 show a surgeon expiring after “eating a hearty dinner of beef with the temperature being 98 deg F”, though privileged excess wasn’t always to blame. Along the Grand Trunk Road and other routes used by the British military, tiny clusters of graves known as “marching cemeteries” appeared at roughly 12-mile intervals, where the casualties of heatstroke were buried when their fellow marchers camped for the night.
Bengal is hotter now – the average temperature of Kolkata has risen at least 1.2C since the mid-19th century – and in May a prolonged heatwave in north India produced a record temperature in Delhi of 49.2C. France and Spain have had their hottest May on record. This month, a weather station in Catalonia registered 43.1C, which is among the hottest days recorded there in any month ever. Forest fires have broken out in Europe; dairy herds suffer in India; farmers everywhere worry about crops. A friend in Delhi writes to tell me of the cruel effects on the urban poor. “At traffic lights you see bicyclists leaning away from cars, to try to duck the flow of recycled air – even hotter than the ambient air – that’s the byproduct of the air-conditioning keeping the driver nicely cool inside.”
And still we present news of heat cheerfully, ignoring the obvious like an East India merchant tucking into his six-bottle dinner. Newspapers show crowded beaches and swimmers splashing in the Serpentine, the TV weather forecasters smile when they promise us a sunny and warm weekend. (And we, too, are glad.) Saffron O’Neill, an academic at the University of Exeter, wrote recently of a conflict in the coverage, which perhaps represents a conflict in ourselves. A study of the European media, she wrote, revealed “a mismatch between the text of the articles and the accompanying visuals”. The headlines announced news of unprecedented heat and the consequences for the sick and elderly people; the photographs featured people having “fun in the sun”. The mismatch was particularly prominent in the UK, O’Neill wrote, which perhaps said something “about how British culture narrates the experience of very hot weather in our historically mild climate”.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/25/hot-weather-britain-fife-mediterranean-heat-pleasure
