Damp Squib

I don't like it when the weather turns all heavy and oppressive. Temperatures above 80°F combined with high humidity cause me to become a giant vegetable. Not to beat about the bush here, I become a bloated and sweaty inanimate object. Bloated because I comfort eat, all the while consuming copious quantities of fluids from which my skin filters out all the toxins before spreading liberally over my wrinkly hide. It's not a pretty sight.

What I most dislike about humidity is the dampness. I hate being damp. This probably harks back to when I was a child and my mother had what was practically a fetish for seeing that no clothing was issued unless it had met her exacting standards for moisture content. Clothing shall have no moisture present within its fibres before it is donned. This shall include atmospheric humidity. A complete non-sequiteur in the great but soggy British climate where if it you can't see the horizon it means that it is raining and if you can can (see the said horizon) it is, in fact, about to rain.

The month of flaming June conceals my birthday. Until I skidded, more or less out of control, into my teen years I had considered that June was the best possible month for a birthday. There being no possible way for relatives to combine Christmas and Birthday gifts and regarding parties ... what better time of year for a party than high summer, when the outdoors is open from dawn to, well, dawn, I guess. Unless, of course it rains. Luckily June is the one month when rain is unusual and so birthdays washed-out by rain just don't figure in my rose-tinted memories.

Anyway, my birthday has been and gone and while there was no precipitation there wasn't much in the way of solar radiation either. Which is a pity because I read the other day, in Sharon's fabulous blog that summer had come to her neck of the woods and that it was both damned hot and damned humid. How I smiled. We don't get heavy weather like that in England until much later in the summer. June is the perfect month for everything in the UK. The schools are still 'in' and the biggest kids are mostly involved in school exams so the shops and the tourist places are pleasant places to be. It is heaven on stick.

Then things took a turn for the worse.

For days the weather forecasters were promising a heatwave. Yeah! Like that is believable. Our island climate is not best suited to predictions ... totally unsuited to be accurate. Anyway, yesterday — as if to prove that anything that is forecast for long enough will happen eventually — the heatwave arrived. Which would have been OK were it not for the fact that I am in the middle of moving house.

My home for the last eight years — the longest I have stayed under one roof — is half packed up and my new place is mine already but in need of some urgent remedial cosmetic treatment. Of course, speaking as a time-served specialist in the art of procrastination, I am well behind schedule in the redecoration stakes. Paint that should be on walls is still in the plastic tubs that pass for paint cans these days. Paint brushes that should be clagged to the roots with clots of congealed vinyl silk emulsion are still in their risqué see-thru acetate sleeves, baring their hairy extremities to an uncaring environment with coquettish brazenness.

Never mind, I thought, with blasé equanimity. I can just go over and chill out, maybe watch some TV, drink a cool beer, or even that oddity that we Brits turn to in times of heat prostration ... a nice hot cup of tea. Yes. I have installed a fridge, a TV and a camp stove in my new premises. The first two are new and had to be delivered somewhere. The latter is more or less essential survival equipment. A fridge I can live without but give me a kettle and a fry-pan and somewhere to make those two get hot and I can live anywhere. I also had a good reason to be "in" at my new address yesterday afternoon. I was expecting a visit from an engineer to hook me up to cable ... erm, everything.

I have been resisting the march of technology for some years now. I am still wedded to the silver jump suits and robots I was promised by Raymond Baxter back when I was still just 'thinking' about owning a bra. I am not technophobic, I love technology and I love all things scientific. But science and technology is pointless unless it does something. Cable TV didn't do it by my reckoning. I can get five channels for nothing with a cheap TV and a bent coathanger; why on earth would I want more than that? I love the internet because it does what says on the tin. It works ... well most of the time, it does.

But times change and so do people and (luckily) the free-enterprise capitalists are very much aware of that and they change their stance too, the better to unscrew the cash from our pockets. I am moving home and I am lazy. Two pretty much inconsistent conditions. Laziness means that I stick with the status quo long after it ceased to be a value for money situation. I may be lazy, but laziness (by my stipulation) requires a certain degree of miserliness. That is why I love the internet; bargain hunting takes so little effort. I've been with my current ISP for quite a while now and they pretty much take me for granted. So much so that they recently cold-called me to offer me a free mobile phone. It was at that moment that it dawned on me that I was maybe paying a little too much for my telephone and internet access to the world.

A little searching revealed that for half what I currently pay, the local cable firm will give me the same deal and throw in 39 channels of shit for nothing. Well hey! I may be an infrequent watcher of TV and 90% of that 39 are so banal they actually require a stronger word (or do I mean 'weaker'?) to define their feebleness in the entertainment scale. Its all to do with way I do maths. The 90% I speak of is a floating proportion; it isn't always the same channels that are beyond the pale. Howver when you have a choice of five, 90% is inevitably going to involve half a TV program. Yes it is true. I actually do sometimes watch half a TV program but only because half is entertaining and I turn off when when I stop being entertained. Oh dear! I feel I am beginning to spout utter rot!

Time to get to the point. The telephone man arrived yesterday afternoon. Looking slightly harrassed and sweaty. He fumbled with his ID with what may have been embarrassment as he introduced himself. Maybe he was psychic. After we had gone through the "where do I want it" routine he departed to get his tools ... (this a strictly male thing, I have noticed. Men set out to do a job without a single item of equipment, they then proceed to examine the said task, suck their teeth, make faces and extravagant gestures and then return to safe base to collect — almost — all the tools and material they will need). He returned with a screwdriver and a little grey doo-hickey and unscrewed the cover of the main junction box and clipped the doo-hickey to the wires within. It made a noise like a budgerigar with an inflamed cloaca. I left him to his devices and attended to the haus frauly business of making the workman his tea ... 5 sugars naturally.

Some minutes elapsed during which time the telephone man was like some kind of djinn. It was a case of now you see him, now you don't. Mostly it was a case of his little grey doo-hickey making its oddly strangled parakeet warble; a sound that I found resistant to direction location. I was beginning to wonder what earthly use was a noise that could not be localised when I caught sight of 'my' man. He was talking into his sleeve. I sidled closer to hear what was being said. The news wasn't good. I quickly gleaned from his conversation with "base" that 'my' cable isn't in one piece. A new one needs to be pulled through. So saying, he packed up his little grey doo-hickey, screwed the cover into the place on my junction box and with a cheery wave he departed after assuring me that the cable-pulling crew would make contact first thing on Monday. A whole crew! Goodness. Is my cable to run uninterrupted all the way from Chateau Trillian to Cable Central? That sounds like like just too much of a bargain.

After he had gone I fell into a miserable introspection centred mostly around the fact that the east-facing (and thus the coolest rooms) in my new mansion had acquired a fine sheen of condensation on the undecorated cold surfaces. It was at that point that I heard my mother's voice warning me against dallying for too long in a damp atmosphere and so I beat a hasty retreat, breaking my journey halfway back to what still passes for "home" to pick up some Argentinian sirloin, a baguette, a bag of Italian salad, a small wedge of ripe brie and the inevitable bottle of Oz shiraz because cooking for one is a total bore but even a peasant knows how to introduce a slab of cow to a very hot griddle for a few minutes while uncorking the wine and drizzling some extra-virgin olive oil over the greenery. (I ate half the bread while I waited for the bus having forgotten it was Saturday and the buses run a totally screwed up schedule.)

Whilst I chewed the delicious crusty French treat (resisting the urge to break out the brie as well, because then I might have to get out the beef and just jerk the bastard stuff under the mid-afternoon solstice sun) I gained an admiring audience of pigeons but they didn't look as hungry as I felt. I am so mean!