Sweltering

Depending upon how you look at things, the current British summer continues to be one of the best ever.

Take today for example, the sun shone from 5am to 9pm and the mid-afternoon temperature reached 32℃. It was the same yesterday and it will be the same tomorrow with a clear blue sky overhead. I think Andrew in Melbourne was probably right when he suggested that my shenanigans in Derby on Wednesday had saved me from undertaking a demanding physical trial - " maybe it was a good thing that you didn't walk in the heat." That day was significantly hotter than the forecasters had predicted.

This week I have spent a significant amount of time in our subterranean "underhouse" area. It is always a few degrees cooler down there - like spending time in a cave. I removed some old kitchen cabinets that I put up thirty years ago. In the course of time they had collapsed.

I replaced them with some sturdy shelving I had purchased from a nationwide company which has, in my opinion anyway, an unfortunate name - "Screwfix". The instruction sheet with the pack was laughable. It claimed that the job could be done in thirty minutes. Clearly, whoever wrote those instructions had not contemplated our iron-hard engineering bricks.

Drilling into them is like drilling into granite. I even had some new carbide-tipped drill bits by "De Walt" to ensure progress. But I got there in the end and the shelves are up - hoo-bloody-rah! I also had some plastic drawer units delivered to tuck under my long work bench - replacing a chest of particle board drawers that have seen better days.

Our underhouse is really my domain. Shirley hardly ever goes down there and I have to admit that the place is an utter mess. A jumble of garden implements, DIY tools, storage boxes, tins of paint, bits of wood, old bikes and a jolly Father Christmas we plug in and light up during the festive season. The underhouse also houses our gas boiler and various pipes and electric wiring. It certainly would not win any design awards. I first revealed it in March 2010 when the "room" was less choked up than it is today.

Getting "on top" of the underhouse has been an ongoing  personal struggle for decades. There have been various clearout and organisational campaigns but the chaos always seems to return. Never mind - there's always next month, next year. Maybe, if the truth be known,  outward chaos is possibly a necessary facet of who I am. Tidiness may well be overrated I think.

Anyway, being down there in the cool has made this hot week less oppressive than it might otherwise have been. I have also taken up a new hobby which I will call "nightwalking" - leaving our house and circling the block at ungodly  hours, enjoying the quiet and the cooler night air, perhaps spotting urban foxes or badgers crossing the nearby main road - something that would be suicidal in  daytime hours.

Of course, hot spells bring out lots of moaning minnies and doom-mongers but I must admit that I like summer heat. After all - this is northern England, not northern Florida, Thailand or the island of Rotuma in Fiji. Even when it is really hot here it is eminently manageable and of course we have known plenty of years when summer never really established itself.