Picture of a judge's wigThe Judge RANTS!Picture of a judge's wig



Date: 03/07/18

Too Darn Hot

I'm sorry, but I hate this weather with a passion.

(An explanation for aliens: we in the Untied Condom of Greater Austeria have endured about three weeks of extremely warm weather. 'Extremely warm' compared to what we're used to, that is: daytime temperatures constantly in the 25°C and above range with no rain and very little wind).

I never have got on with hot weather: not when I was a kidlet when it used to give me a bad head and often make me puke; nor in my adolescent years, when night-times were sticky enough without the addition of external humidity (and when sleeping naked was not an option for fear of being - in all senses - discovered by my mother); and certainly not now, when my advancing decrepitude worsens the dehydration I endure in the day (especially its effects on my eyesight) and renders sleep all but impossible at night (so much so that I had to take an unscheduled day off work today because last night was sheer torture; trying to sleep on the sofa in the living-room - where it was a few degrees cooler than in the bedroom - was a wretched failure due to the uncomfortable position I have to adopt to fit on it, and I could neither keep the bedroom window open because of the noises off - usually of some teenage knobhead in a tatty Vauxhall Corsa with a deliberately fucked-up exhaust - nor keep the fan on because of the noises in).

You're not supposed to not enjoy weather like this, of course, and the land is full of people who jeer at the likes of me and say, "You'd be complaining if it was a wet summer!". Well, perhaps. But the point is that we are not, in these latitudes, supposed to have long stretches of the same bloody thing. One of the engaging features of our climate is its variability, and to have the settings stuck at Regulo 8 for an extended period is not merely draining, it is very, very boring, not least because it precludes being able to actually do anything in it.

And "Met men say there's more to come!". If that is so, I'll be sitting here again all day with all the curtains closed and sleeping in the fridge at night, lest I succumb to the fate warned against by my mother when I was a small boy with a tendency to sleep with his head under the bedclothes, viz., "By the morning, you'll have turned into a little grease ball!".

I can, therefore, empathise with the late, great First Lady of Jazz herself, here in blazing form interpreting Cole Porter:


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('Pitch the woo' is one of those cutesy-pie American euphemisms on the same wavelength of intent as the annoyingly sucrose 'making romance'. In other words, to put it into neo-Trumpian terms, 'screwing').