Hot

The Hottest May Day Ever

Heckity pie, but it’s hot.

I’m not a hot person. I wasn’t cut out for it. I’m the wrong shape, wrong temperament, wrong spiritual arrangement, wrong all of it, for heat. My thyroid won’t co-operate, much compromised by an inner thermostat that packed a bag years ago and hasn’t sent so much as a postcard. Because there’s no regulation happening in here. No civilised perspiring. (Sorry Nana, I know you told me that horses sweat, and lady’s perspire, but it rather seems your granddaughter is a Shetland pony). Just me, swelling quietly like a dumpling.

Everything feels slightly wrong when it gets this warm. My fingers feel puffy. My face looks like I live in a greenhouse and I start obsessing about water retention and electrolytes and whether I should be eating salt, not eating salt, drinking more, drinking less, lying on the floor, or simply accepting that I’ve become a rosy pink blancmange?

Apparently it’s the hottest May day ever. Or nearly ever. One of those days where the news whips out a scorchio red map and a man in rolled-up sleeves rocks up, looking grave in Birmingham, because we are British and its entirely possible that we will all drop dead overnight if we don’t remember to pop our sheets in the freezer before bedtime.

We do need to worry about global warming, don’t we? Or something. Because the somethings shifting. The air. The seasons. The mood of things. The whole world feels over-bright and slightly feverish, as if someone’s turned the contrast up too high and forgotten to turn it back down. And it isn’t just the heat. It’s what heat does to people. It thins everybody’s patience until you can see the bones of them. Ordinary irritations grow teeth. A parked car becomes an insult. A slammed gate a declaration of war. People start wandering about in a state of sticky moral outrage and, frankly, nobody has the calves for it.

Outside, in the unadopted lane down the side of the house, there’s a tiny old man who must be nearly ninety, though he may have been nearly ninety since 1987 and simply refused to proceed. He owns a set of garages there and spends his days patrolling them like a furious little emperor, sticking notices on any car he thinks is too close to his gates, which appears to be every car that has ever existed.

People come out to find these awful, melted-on notices slapped to their windscreens. Angry little declarations. Get off my path, or words to that effect. Though it isn’t really a path. It isn’t really anything. Just a strip of hot, grudging cobblestones where everybody’s trying to live and nobody’s covering themselves in glory.

Between him and the lady in the big house who runs out periodically to screech at people in a language I don’t understand, and the man at the end with the wild dreadlocks who looks both profound and permanently disappointed in civilisation, it’s the oddest place to live.

A little theatre of people and their grievances.

Not quite a neighbourhood. More a strange little row of people with their gates, grudges and private outrage. Everyone guarding some invisible territory. Everyone hot, tired, wounded, irritated, afraid.

It makes me sad. Because beneath all the notices and screeching and muttering at parked cars, there’s something else, isn’t there? Loneliness, probably? Fear? The terrible human need to matter somewhere, even if only by becoming an absolute nuisance beside a garage door.

Inside, I’m trying my best to keep things cool.

Which involves a frankly ridiculous amount of strategy for an ordinary day in May. I can’t decide about the windows. Should they be open? Should they be shut? If I open them, am I inviting the heat in? Am I saying, come in, heat, take the good chair, ruin my life? Or is the house suffocating because I’ve sealed it up like a tomb? Nobody teaches you this. They teach you about cloud formations and long division, but not whether to open the bedroom window at two o’clock during a freak May heatwave when your thighs are stuck to the sofa and you’ve started resenting your own hair.

Now though. The bedroom door propped open with a massive old copy of the complete works of Bernard Shaw. An ex-library book found in the loft, an enormous thing. A brick of a thing. A literary breeze block. Doing a fine job, which is more than can be said for Bernard Shaw in most domestic emergencies.

Meanwhile, wasps keep hurling themselves at the windows. Mad wasps. Furious wasps. Wasps with a vendetta against their own brains. They fly at the panes with tiny kamikaze fury, conk themselves out on the invisible barrier between them and whatever stupid wasp dream they’re chasing, then drop dramatically, stunned, dead or embarrassed. And I laugh and I shouldn’t laugh because we are all God’s creatures and maybe I should walk in their flip flops before I declare them ludicrous, but I do laugh because they’re all rage and no plan, which feels, in this weather, a little too close to home?

For here I am, all rage (and joy) and no plan, so I have dressed in weather that has gone too far, for survival, not dignity: black yoga pants so loose they’re practically leaving me. Hanging about my hips below indecently low black camisole that is, frankly, one deep breath away from becoming an incident, but oh, the freedom of it. The scandalous breeze. The tiny rebellion of skin meeting air. My hair is piled into a mad bun on top of my head, a structure with no integrity whatsoever and I’m wafting about with a moisturising face sheet mask slapped across my face for cooling purposes, which along with I’ve dabbed peppermint at the back of my neck, is doing something. Not enough, obviously, but something? A tingle. A little minty hope. A suggestion that the body might yet be negotiated with.

And then, of course, there is the feet water again.

Feet water is the most ludicrous expression. I know this. I hear it. It sounds like something a medieval peasant would ask for after being chased by a goat. But I’m keeping it because it makes me laugh.

So yes, “feet water.”

Cold, soapy feet water in a washing-up bowl on the floor. Absurdly refreshing and ridiculously restorative. The kind of thing that makes you think, now then, why don’t I do this every day? Why have I spent decades ignoring the possibility that the answer to despair might be a bowl of cold water and a slightly manky towel, because we are people not in possession of a washing machine so make do with bucket washes that quite frankly don’t do the job.

So yes, there I was, in this stuffy house, drinking something cold, my face masked, my neck minty, my feet in their water, watching the world shimmer.

Next door, the children were shrieking in the paddling pool with the sort of joy adults only experience when cancelling plans. Splashing and squealing and throwing their whole bodies into pleasure without once wondering about sodium levels. Beyond them, the trees were doing their full summer performance. That wild little display of provincial nature we get here. Not National Trust nature with a tea room and a tasteful fern. Just stubborn, leafy, uninvited abundance. Buddleia and sycamore and bramble and whatever it is that grows over fences when nobody’s got the heart to stop it.

And I sat there, looking out at it all, and felt calm.

I ate without looking at my phone.

(I know. Alert the Vatican!)

And I can’t remember the last time I did that. Just sat and ate and did nothing else. No scrolling. No reading. No answering. No filling every spare inch of my head with noise in case one quiet thought slipped in and started opening drawers.

I ate a sandwich and paid attention to it. The bread. The ice cold egg. The act of chewing. The small sanity of feeding oneself. And it felt almost profound, which is ridiculous, except it isn’t.

Because I’m constantly trying to fill my head. Must keep busy. Must keep working. Must keep thinking. Must make a plan. Must solve the unsolvable before teatime. Must research. Must write. Must improve. Must remember the thing I forgot. Must not stop, because stopping might mean feeling, and feeling is often lying in wait with a mallet.

I don’t even know why I’m so afraid of stillness. Only that I am, these days?

But heat has a strange way of making stillness unavoidable. It pins you. It says, no, darling, sit down. There will be no great efficiency today. No noble productivity. No brisk clearing of drawers. Today you will sit there in your falling-down yoga pants with a sheet mask on your face, peppermint on your neck and your feet in a bowl like a woman in a low-budget sanatorium, and you will call it healing because, irritatingly, it is.

Then somewhere in the middle of all this, Finn rang.

And there it was, that surreal mother-son dream of a conversation we have, where he is telling me in lavish, exacting detail about the stories in his head, the worlds within worlds, the characters, the plots, the rules, the histories, the secrets of whatever enormous imaginative continent he is currently building, and I am listening, delighted and baffled and only just keeping up, while also interrupting him every five minutes to say, “Have you eaten anything?”

Because this is motherhood, isn’t it? Half awe, half frozen peas.

He was explaining something intricate and wonderful, some story logic I could feel mattered enormously to him, and I was there nodding into the phone like a literary agent in a face mask, saying, “Yes, yes, that makes sense,” while also saying, “Put some peas on. Frozen peas. Just eat them. No, not later. Now. You need something green.”

He said he was about to make lunch.

Mash and mackerel, apparently. And I’m not judging. I am, after all a woman with my feet in water, peppermint on my neck and Bernard Shaw wedged against a door. I have no culinary high ground to speak of. But still, mash and mackerel did give me pause.

“Is mash and mackerel an odd combination for lunch?” I said, because apparently even in a heatwave I retain some commitment to asking the important questions.

He laughed.

“It is what it is, Mum. I’m not Heston Blumenthal.”

And that was it. I was gone. Because what can you say to that? There’s no comeback. It is what it is, Mum. I’m not Heston Blumenthal. A sentence so dry, so perfect, so entirely Finn. It made me laugh in the way only he can. That helpless, hot-day Mama laughing where you’re already slightly deranged from the weather and everything lands too hard. The kind of laugh that bubbles up and makes your sheet mask slip and your camisole threaten legal action.

And God, I needed it.

I needed that silly, rambling conversation. I needed the strange comfort of hearing him explain his inner worlds while I fussed about peas. I needed the ordinary holiness of it. My son, somewhere else, eating an odd lunch and making me laugh. Me here, ridiculous and damp and slightly exposed to the universe, worrying about his vegetables while wasps thudded themselves senseless against the glass.

It was all so ordinary and so beautiful I could hardly bear it.

Because I’ve been trying, in my own erratic way, to come back to myself lately.

This has involved singing bowl meditations, which I’ve been forcing Ben to do with me. (No, forcing is perhaps too strong, inviting with spiritual menace, maybe?)

He lies still for a while. Really gives it his best. Then, just as I’m starting to sink into that gorgeous shimmering vibration, that hum that seems to run from the crown of my head right down into my toes, I feel one sneaky finger creeping up my arm. A tickle, that says I’m still here. And you are there lost in some revery.

“No,” I whisper, with the authority of a monk at the end of her tether. “No, no, no. You have to keep still.”

And he tries. He really does. But asking a man riddled with ADHD to lie motionless while a bowl sings at him is, in fairness, a big ask. A heroic ask. Still, I want him to feel it. That deep loosening. That golden internal unclenching. That sensation of the body finally downtooling and saying, oh thank God.

Because I feel it. When I let myself. When I’m not fussing, scrolling, planning, catastrophising, reheating coffee, or mentally moving house for the eight thousandth time before lunch.

There’s something in that sound that unhooks me from myself.

Or hooks me back in. Maybe both?

I’ve been leaning into all manner of somatic things lately. Body things. Small, slightly ridiculous rituals to help with this feeling I get, this need to almost jump out of my own skin with frustration. Not ordinary frustration. Not where-are-my-keys frustration. More like every nerve in me has packed a suitcase and is standing by the door shouting, WE CANNOT STAY HERE ANOTHER MINUTE.

So I’m trying to give the body somewhere to put it all.

Cold water on my wrists.

Peppermint at the back of my neck.

Tapping my collarbones.

Sitting in silence.

Eating without the phone.

Feet water. Always feet water now.

Letting a singing bowl vibrate through my bones like a tiny domestic exorcism.

And dancing.

Oh, the dancing.

Every time Ben goes out, I dance like an unhinged child during a modern dance session in a dusty school hall. Dramatic, ludicrous, spinning. Arms everywhere. Hair everywhere. Feet thumping. A private interpretive scream into the silence, beyond the music in my head.

I spin and fling and swoop and twist, as if auditioning for Flashdance and I know it must look comical. Wildly comical. If anyone saw me through the window, they’d either call an ambulance or applaud politely and move away embarrassed

But by the end of it I feel exhilarated.

As if something trapped in me has been given a trapdoor. As if a locked cupboard has burst open and out came not skeletons, but scarves, birds, old fury, glitter, sweat, and a woman I thought I’d mislaid.

I think I’d started to feel separate from my body.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way anyone else would notice. Just slowly, quietly, by degrees. Living too much in thought. In fear. In logistics. In worry. In the endless administrative weather of being a woman trying to keep a life stitched together while also wondering what on earth has happened to her hormones, her plans, her energy, her waist, her patience, her future, and the blasted charger.

And when you live entirely in your head, the head becomes a dangerous place.

Mine does, anyway. I’m not special in this. It’s true for all of us, I think. Stay too long in the upstairs room of the mind and everything starts to echo. Thoughts breed in the corners. Worries breed faster. Before you know it you’re conducting full-scale imaginary court cases with people who don’t give a damn, while your body sits downstairs with cold feet and a biscuit, wondering when someone’s coming back for it.

There’s a woman whose name I can never remember properly when I need it, who wrote about the four rooms of the self. The idea that we need to visit each room daily: the physical, the emotional, the mental, the spiritual. Not move into one and let the others gather dust. Not live forever in the mind room with the curtains closed and a spreadsheet open.

We need to visit them all. And I don’t think I have been.

I think I’ve been barricaded in the mind room, pacing, planning, worrying, imagining, bracing. Because when life feels uncertain, that’s where I go. Into thought. Into analysis. Into trying to outwit the future by thinking harder than it?

But the body keeps score, doesn’t it? The body waits. The body swells in the heat and aches in the night and asks for water and movement and rest and touch and actual food eaten with actual attention. The body doesn’t care about your five-year plan if you haven’t unclenched your jaw since a jaffa cake breakfast.

So this week I’m trying to come downstairs again.

Into the room of the body.

Into cold wrists and bare feet.

Into sandwiches tasted properly.

Into heat survived badly but honestly.

Into the shimmer of the singing bowl.

Into laughter with a man who can’t stop tickling during meditation.

Into the long rambling wonder of Finn’s inner worlds and the practical matter of frozen peas.

Into the ridiculous private dancing that makes me feel, for five whole minutes, not trapped but alive.

Outside, the lane continues in its strange little theatre. Notices on windscreens. Gates defended. People shouting into the heat. The old man with his grievances. The lady with her fury. The dreadlocked philosopher at the end, brooding like a weather-beaten prophet. Wasps throwing themselves at windows like tiny idiots with a cause.

And inside, I prop the door open with Bernard Shaw and try not to inflate.

I drink something cold.

I press my wrists under the tap.

I laugh about mash and mackerel.

I listen to the children next door hurling themselves into water as if joy is the simplest thing in the world.

I watch the trees holding their green nerve.

And I think, perhaps this is the work now?

Not becoming better, or calmer in some smug, lifestyle wannabe way. Not even trying to rise above everything, because honestly, who has the upper-body strength?

Just returning.

Again and again.

To the body. To this room. To a ham and egg butty. To the cool glass in my hand. To the mint on my neck. To the ridiculous blessing of feet water. To the sound that hums through bone. To the daft, holy dance of a woman freeing something she didn’t know she’d locked away.

The world is too hot. The lane is mad. The future’s uncertain. My thyroid has resigned from public service. The wasps are losing their tiny minds. My trousers are falling off. My camisole is indecent. My son is not Heston Blumenthal.

And somehow, somehow, the day is gorgeous.

Resented and adored.

Too much and not enough.

A hot, daft, shimmering little miracle of a day, full of grievances and giggles, peppermint and paddling pools, falling waistbands and flying insects, sandwich crumbs and imaginary worlds, a day that left me damp and swollen and weirdly grateful to be here at all.

Really here.

In my body.

In the heat.

In the house.

Feet in the water, laughing.

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