Heatwave

Yesterday hit over 30 degrees – that's Celsius, for any Reform-voting holdouts still clinging to Fahrenheit, Imperial weights, shillings and the notion that “foreigners” are ruining the country by bringing us both pandemics and paprika.

One walk down the average British street in this weather and you can immediately spot the houses occupied by those who proudly describe themselves as “the indigenous population” – a phrase they use without irony, despite being a biological lasagne of Celt, Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman, Huguenot, and at least one Polish plumber who came round in 1982 and never quite left.

These are the folk who, faced with a heatwave, fling open every window as though inviting the sun in for a cup of tea and a rummage through the sideboard. Curtains billow like HMS Victory under full sail. Blinds are pegged uselessly upwards, as if sunlight can be reasoned with. And there's always some bloke topless in the front garden, tending to his sunburn like it’s a badge of patriotism.

Meanwhile, anyone who’s ever been to sea, set foot south of Calais or spent a week in Andalusia knows the trick: close the windows. Shut the blinds. Draw the curtains. Keep the cool air in and the blazing inferno out. Then, and only then, once evening falls and the air outside is less like Satan’s hairdryer, you cautiously crack a window like a safe.

But try telling that to Barry from number 12, who thinks “thermal dynamics” is a brand of barbecue. No, Barry’s got all the windows open and a Dyson fan whirring full blast – trying to cool a room that’s now the same temperature as a foundry furnace in Qatar. Then he’ll complain on Facebook that he “couldn’t sleep ‘cos of this foreign weather” and blame it on “the bloody EU.”

The irony, of course, is that the very people who yell loudest about defending traditional British values – warm beer, cold shoulders, and casual xenophobia – are the ones utterly incapable of adapting to a warm day. They don’t just suffer through it – they insist on suffering through it incorrectly, like a man insisting his shoes fit while limping home barefoot.

Give them a referendum and they’ll vote to remove all blinds, export shade, and reintroduce compulsory tweed for the under-fives. All in the name of sovereignty, obviously.

So next time you’re walking past open windows radiating heat like pizza ovens and wonder who voted for Farage, just remember – you’re looking at a house where science lost to stubbornness, and logic was deported sometime around 2016.

As an aside, I achieved 94% self-sufficiency on electricity usage yesterday with the solar PV battery setup I had installed in March.