Heatwave and an invitation to name storms created record-breaking opportunities to indulge nation’s favourite pastime
The best descriptions of summer heat, in my view, come from Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, a novel in which, “the world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer … like a silent crazy jungle under glass.” Or Muriel Spark, in her short story The Seraph and the Zambezi, set in southern Africa in 1946, where “the heat distorted every word” and sound, writes Spark, “reached my ears a fraction behind time”. Of a bunch of white settlers enjoying pink gins on the terrace, she writes, “the glasses made a tinkle that was not of the substance of glass, but of bottles wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes, for a moment, a shriek or a cackle would hang torpidly in space, but these were unreal sounds as if projected from a distant country.”
