Who's The Daddy: Hot weather and hot tempers on our grey little island
I like it hot but this is too hot. Does that just about cover it? In our little corner of the world we deal with every extreme of temperature the best way we know how - by hitting the panic button as early and as hard as we can.
Light dusting of snow one January morning? Cancel all public transport and shut all the schools until further notice.
Temperatures hit 28C three days running and it doesn’t rain for a week? Issue an extreme weather warning and a hosepipe ban.
Maybe it’s because we live on a grey little island in the middle of nowhere where nothing much happens we feel we have to go giddy when the sun comes out for a bit.
One exception to this rule is as follows - if you take your dog for a walk during a heatwave between 9am and 7pm, then we are no longer friends. In fact, next time you do it, make sure you put on your heaviest winter coat, scarf, bobble hat, mittens, the lot and see how you like it.
On Monday it was just too hot all day, and for the first time since the last heatwave, whenever that was, our sighthound Walter didn’t get taken out on a walk - he normally gets two. And honestly, once it got to around 8.30pm and the penny dropped that he wasn’t going out, he shot me the filthy look mastered by pointy-faced dogs down the ages when things don’t go their way.
So what? He misses a walk or two. That won’t kill him. But heatstroke might.
Anything else this week? Oh yeah, it never ceases to amaze how busy Manchester Airport gets at 3am. When I dropped Daughter #2 off on Friday morning for the first of her three flights to the cruise ship she’s working on this summer that was in dry dock in France, I thought we’d be the only ones there.
How wrong can you be? When we joined the queue to check in her luggage we were around half an hour from the front. And let me tell you, everyone’s at least 50% crankier than normal at that time in the morning.
Anyway, after a full day of travelling, Daughter #2 boarded, and at the time of writing she’s about to do the first opening run of the new game show in the ship’s theatre - with all the high-ups coming to watch (passengers don’t get on til the weekend). So, no pressure then.
This is her fourth tour of duty in two years, bobbing around on the high seas on massive cruise ships, and it’s fair to say she’s got a taste for it.
See the world on someone else’s dime while you’re young. Why not?
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