I write en plein déshabillé, as the French say, for it is hot. Even my head is nude, after a ruthless haircut, where for the first time in my life I asked for a setting of zero on the clippers. At the beginning of the week, the Met Office issued a warning not to exercise between 11am and 3pm. I have taken this advice to heart and so have decided not to exercise since 1963. Most of my time is spent lying on my bed, the window wide open. I have forgone the living room, for it faces south, into the sun, and the scaffolding prevents me from opening the window more than three inches. “Don’t describe the weather,” say the creative writing manuals. Well, balls to that, if the weather is the only show in town.
Last night was a bit embarrassing. It was the evening and things had cooled down sufficiently for me to be able to go back to the living room. I heard a noise above me – alarming, for I occupy the top floor. But it was one of the workmen coming down the ladder from the roof. He was about six feet away from me as he climbed down past my window. I had still not put any clothes on. Reader, he saw everything. This wouldn’t be too bad except that this particular workman is also my downstairs neighbour. Now, I get on with him fine but there are some things one is not meant to see as a neighbour, and my naked body is definitely one of them. I suppose the trauma is mostly his; mine is just the embarrassment. There is some good news to come from this. After months of total inactivity, the scaffolding is being used for the purpose intended, and should be coming down in two weeks. Whether my neighbour and I will be able to look each other in the eye is another matter entirely.
In the bedroom, I get to hear the musical tastes of Brighton. When I moved into the Hove-l, the road outside my bedroom was as quiet as a village street; the traffic was confined to the Western Road, Brighton’s furred main artery. Then about three weeks after I moved in, Brighton & Hove City Council decided to ease the traffic there, which meant that most of it, apart from the buses, shifted up to where I live. So I breathe in traffic fumes, and hear throughout the day the car and motorbike engines, and the music that the car drivers play. About three times a year I hear something that isn’t rubbish. I once heard the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon” being played and that was magic; another time I heard some classical music, and thought, “How lovely, Brighton has cultured people,” until I remembered that the music was coming from my kitchen, where the radio was tuned to Radio 3.
In the end, I find that the best way to cope is to retreat – or possibly advance – into a fantasy world, just as Snoopy would pretend to be a First World War flying ace to escape his present cares. The trick, you see, is that the world into which one is escaping is worse than the world one inhabits.
Anyway I first invented my fantasy world when incapacitated in a very shabby hotel room in Morocco, where there was not even a ceiling fan, let alone air conditioning. It is a kind of mishmash of every Brit stranded abroad in a hot climate, from Tony Last, feverish in the jungle, reading Dickens until the end of his life to a psychotic despot in A Handful of Dust; Flory in Orwell’s Burmese Days, railing against the cruelties of the colonialists while falling hopelessly in love with a clergyman’s daughter sent out there to find a husband (I think I’m mixing up two Orwell novels here, but so what, the heat is making me delirious); the soldiers of It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, their faces glistening with sweat and their uniforms dripping at the armpits. (That TV sitcom might have contained some awful ethnic stereotypes but at least it conveyed the sensation of stifling heat very well, all ranks and castes helpless against it. I always identified with “La-di-da” Gunner Graham, with his glasses and his copy of Ulysses (or “Useless” as his sergeant-major called it). Also every Graham Greene foreign consul filling his tooth-mug with horrible whisky and brooding about his faith, and the native woman he is sleeping with. Honestly, for a people who say they hate the hot weather, the British do an awfully good job of imagining themselves in it.
“Carruthers scowled into his glass of Edward VIII very rare whisky, his linen suit clinging to his body as the flies buzzed listlessly about the room. The ceiling fan did nothing more than stir the fetid air. Damn this heat, he said to himself. Damn his Catholic faith. Damn this war. Damn this spying job I have to do, whatever it is. He had by now forgotten which side he was meant to be working for. Plop, went another drop of sweat into his whisky. Damn his downstairs neighbour who had seen him naked earlier that day, as he lay guiltily restless against the almond-brown body of…” OK, you get the idea.
Oh well, I’m back in Brighton. If only there was a large body of cold water nearby, preferably free at the point of access, I could jump into to take the edge off.
[Further reading: The shame of the Frida Kahlo industry]
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This article appears in the 01 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Happy Birthday America
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