The best descriptions of summer heat, in my view, come from Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, a novel in which, "the world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer ... like a silent crazy jungle under glass." Or Muriel Spark, in her short story The Seraph and the Zambezi, set in southern Africa in 1946, where "the heat distorted every word" and sound, writes Spark, "reached my ears a fraction behind time". Of a bunch of white settlers enjoying pink gins on the terrace, she writes, "the glasses made a tinkle that was not of the substance of glass, but of bottles wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes for a moment, a shriek or a cackle would hang torpidly in space, but these were unreal sounds as if projected from a distant country."
This week, much of Britain enjoyed an unbroken run of 30C days and we were all yanked back to that distant country - the one in which we sat in hot classrooms clad head to toe in polyester, wilting to LP Hartley's The Go-Between. "In the heat," wrote Hartley, "the commonest objects changed their nature," and no matter how many summers we've been through, this fact seems to surprise every time.
What struck me this week as temperatures soared was how particular each heatwave is to its locality. In New York, summer comes with light as harsh and unshaded as fluorescent strip lighting and the sky is an angry blue. In the southern hemisphere, where the sun is at its strongest, you can walk down the street and feel the heat on your back like a hand, pushing. In Britain, however, the country remains pale and watery in even the hottest weather, an apparent mildness of light and sky that somehow makes the trees seem more green, the effect of high temperatures more surreal and the people, after three consecutive days of hot weather, inclined to completely lose our minds.
The English dream is not of nice weather but of any weather that provides a pretext to talk about it. This week, on top of the thrill of the heatwave, the Met Office gave the nation more fuel for its pastime with a warning that in the current climate, the chances of Britain experiencing 45C heat in the next 12 years have risen to 50/50. (In 2022, temperatures hit 40C for the first time on record).
You could talk about the terrible consequences of this, or the failures to date of world leaders to staunch global warming, but really what most of us wanted to do was to say "45 degrees!" and pull a series of cor-blimey faces. There was more: in what pushes us close, surely, to a record-breaking week in opportunities for weather chat in this country, the Met Office went on to issue an invitation to the public to come up with suggestions for storm names for the 2025/26 season.
Last year, you may recall, Storm Bert wreaked havoc on the west coast, and there was also Storm Darragh and a series of storm back up names, such as Storm Conall, Mavis and Tilly. But precedent won't help us here. Opening up submissions to the public this year is a terrible idea given how hilarious everyone in this country finds themselves and we all know how this ends: with Storm Stormy McStormface and Storm Stormzy.
Commentary around the joint appearance of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer in Canada this week focused on the dismaying optics of our prime minister scrabbling about on the ground to pick up papers the more powerful leader had dropped. What better illustration of the literal grovelling required to get on the American president's good side?
It was a little mortifying to watch, I agree. But when you stop to think about it, what strikes me about this vignette from the G7 is Starmer’s entirely normal human instinct, when someone standing beside you drops their papers, to bend to the floor to help pick them up. It’s not Starmer’s subservience that stands out in this scene, but Trump’s psychopathy as he stands there like a boulder, not helping to clear up his own mess.
Of course it was only about the fourth weirdest thing the American president did this week, as he continues to extemporise and jazz-hand his way to the brink of war with Iran. A clear winner was the message Trump put out on Truth Social about Iran’s leader: “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding ... We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.” A thoughtful clarification, here, for Trump’s slowest followers, that “take out” in this context doesn’t indicate the president’s desire to buy the Ayatollah dinner.
Woo, a hatchet job of a superstar novelist beloved by everyone in Gen Z and above! If you are someone who takes an interest in other people’s bad reviews, you will probably already have received, from multiple sources, a link to Tom Crewe’s amazingly unequivocal takedown of Ocean Vuong in this week’s London Review of Books.
“I groaned my way through The Emperor of Gladness,” writes Crewe of Vuong’s new novel, a prequel to his million-selling debut On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and an Oprah Book Club pick that is selling very briskly. “I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open the covers. It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life.” He went on: “This is because, while it is bad in all the ways that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was bad, it is also bad in new and unexpected ways.”
For example, wrote Crewe, this novel, “has a much higher proportion of dialogue, for which Vuong has no talent. It tries, and fails, to be funny.”
It is also, he writes, “inordinately long and almost entirely filler”. I haven’t read the new book, but I thoroughly enjoyed Vuong’s debut and disagree with much of this 5,000 word review. Although not enough, of course, to undermine the pleasure of reading an example of a critic telling us what he really thinks.
Let’s end the week in a happy place, with the wedding of Alex Soros, one of the five children of billionaire George Soros, and Huma Abedin, former political aide to Hillary Clinton whose wretched ex-husband, Anthony Weiner, arguably bears a greater responsibility for putting Trump in the White House than any other individual. (It was Weiner sending crotch photos to young women that, in a series of unlikely events, delivered a hard drive with Hillary’s emails to the FBI boss, James Comey).
But after all, here’s a fairytale ending - or, depending on your view, the kind of nightmare that wakes you up at 2am in a cold sweat: you are getting married in a huge tent in the Hamptons in the presence of 500 people including Kamala Harris, Anna Wintour, Hillary Clinton and - the icing on it - Jimmy Fallon, who will be making some jokes. Cheers!