Lahore is hot. London feels hotter.
I cannot fully explain it. Lahore sits at 37 degrees and you make your peace with it. London climbs to something lower and it presses down harder, as if the city has no way to let the heat back out once it is in. Maybe it is the humidity. Maybe it is that we spend most of the year cold here, so the body never learns to expect the heat, and every summer it has to start again from nothing. Or maybe the city just holds it and will not give it back.
A few evenings ago I went for a ride and ended up in Hornchurch. There is a high point in the country park where the path opens out and you can see central London laid flat on the horizon, except that evening you couldn’t, not really. The city had dissolved into the haze. The sun was a hard white disc. There was one wooden picnic table sitting in the open, no shade anywhere near it, and the gravel underfoot was pale and dry. It was the start of the heatwave. You could feel it deciding to stay.
The thing about the sun here is that people love it. They get so little of it that when it appears, the little it appears, they pour themselves into it. The parks fill up. People lie flat on the grass. The pubs empty out onto the pavement. Shirts come off. Somewhere there is always BBQ smoke. Lunch gets eaten outside on any surface that will take a person. The whole city tips itself toward the light, like a room full of plants on a windowsill.
In Lahore the sun is not a thing you chase. I was there last year, and at noon you get out of it. You find shade, a fan, a room with the curtains drawn. There the sun is the part of the day you negotiate around. Here it is the part everyone waits for.
I am somewhere in between, which is to say I am no help to anyone. London weather goes from one extreme to the other, cold to too hot, with very little in the middle. The middle is the only part I actually want. A bit of shade and a bit of sun. London does not do “a bit.”
It is not only the heat. Spring and summer come with hayfever, and even now, writing this, I am sneezing, my eyes and throat itching. The stretch I actually wait for all year is the very end of summer, the last few weeks, once the pollen has gone. Warm but cool, and not cold yet. A few weeks of the in-between I keep wanting. Then it is over.
So the heatwave arrives, and for a day or two it is wonderful, and then, at least for me, it starts to burn. Some of that is real: this was the hottest May the country has ever recorded, just over 35 degrees at Kew, more than two degrees past a mark that had stood since 1922. But some of it is just the feeling. The sense that there is nowhere cool left to stand. The grass has gone brown. The trees, the plants in their pots, all of it looks scorched.
One thing still makes me laugh through all of it. The heatwave alerts. The announcements telling you to avoid unnecessary travel and to carry water with you. After a Lahore afternoon, where this kind of heat is ordinary, it is hard to take entirely seriously.
It breaks on Monday, they say. After that, rain, for at least a week. The city will go straight from one extreme to the other and skip the middle again, the way it always does. I will probably be glad of it anyway. Everything could use a drink.
The picnic table is still up there, in the open, in the haze. By next week it will be wet and empty. People will be back the moment the sun is. They always are.
