Weekend supplement

Too boiled to type edition

everything linked below

Morning! Have you melted? I have. I feel like one of those cartoons that’s an amorphous blob/puddle with just a pair of eyes. I’m writing this on Friday, the hottest day of the heatwave yet, from what is today officially the hottest place in the UK. It is grotesquely hot.

I’ve just restacked the bookshelves in my office because they were repainted this week and the books were in piles on the floor, blocking my desk. It was an mad thing to do and now I am SPENT and have realised that I could have just left it because there’s no way I could write this in that room - it’s about 79 billion degrees in there.

The kitchen table is even worse because I’ve only just turned off the Aga (months late, but I so love using it) and it hasn’t cooled down yet. We have friends coming to stay later and I wanted to cook, but it is impossible. So now they’re getting tomatoes and bread and cheese and olives and a voice note saying they might want to stop off at a McDonald’s on the way.

Halfway through. You know how you get superhuman strength when you’re determined to move e.g. a huge sofa and you’re by yourself? I was like that with the books. WHOMP, off the floor, piles at a time. WHOMP, on the shelf, ROAR, what heat? Then I lay on the floor and felt really dizzy

The coolest room in the house is the downstairs loo, which is quite a big room, and whence (whence! maybe I have heatstroke) I now write, sitting on the floor, like the first lines of I Capture The Castle gone wrong.

(‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy’ - though I feel I hardly need to remind you. This is basically a newsletter for people who can quote it by heart).

Here are some things I liked this week, apart from the first cherries, which I bought for friends and then gobbled up, two whole punnets, before they’d even arrived, and apart from my nightie dresses, here and here, a blessing from God this week.

Also here is the thinnest dress-dress I have found and purchased. I am wearing it as I type - it’s a super-lightweight cotton, like wearing air, plus beautiful passementerie. It’s very, very mildly seethrough but I don’t think it needs a slip, crucially. Maybe just the more robust sort of underpant, in case. Although so what, really, if clothes are a bit seethrough? I can’t care, at this point. Everyone has a bottom and it’s not interesting, as I used to tell the children when they were small and hysterical with laughter at even the thought of bottoms.

Very good year for cherries. The book is A House Party In Tuscany by Amber Guinness, which is so beautiful and evocative, and also full of lovely recipes. If only it weren't too hot to cook. We’ve mostly been eating olives, crisps, cucumber and ice cream

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