SOME DON'T LIKE IT HOT

“Ooh, Matilda, it’s so hot!” complained Marilyn Monroe. I am like a wilted lettuce in this weather. Wayne-Bough Towers is unbearable in the mornings, and not just because the Berlaymont is the first thing you see when you open the curtains. My residence faces East, and mornings from about 8 until midday are like a sauna, I drift from bed to armchair in a sarong, fanning myself with a copy of the New Statesman and cursing the day I left the servants behind in Africa. You’d never think I’d spent years in the tropics. Perhaps it’s my Time of Life.

I am not good with hot weather. I’m not a beach person, can’t bear grit in my crevices. Being of Celtic colouring, I do not tan. If I do go (under duress, usually) on a beach I have to be under the shade of some trees (those silly beach umbrellas just give you sunburn in the shape of the Coca-Cola logo), wearing a long white organza dress, picture hat and calling for mint julep. The sun does horrible things to me. I cannot see well with the sun directly overhead, get headaches, and cannot read. My earholes are malformed and the earpieces of an iPod will not stay in, so if I wish to listen to music without disturbing others I have to use a set of BBC radio producer headphones which makes me look like some kind of DJ doing an outside broadcast, and I am constantly pestered by youngsters bombarding me with requests for Busted and The Streets. The other alternative is to take my “ghetto blaster” as it is popularly called, and I will be the first to admit that not everyone likes Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

As for the sea – ugh! Don’t get me started. Like many people of my generation who saw “Jaws” when it first came out, I am very wary of the sea. Even around Clacton you can’t be too careful, especially with this global warming business. All sorts of unexpected things could be popping their heads out of the water. I was once swimming in the sea when I glanced down and saw a great black thing underneath me. I didn’t know I could walk on water until then, but I literally ran on the surface all the way back to the beach, before realizing that what I had seen was my own shadow.

Swimming in the sea these days is like volunteering to immerse oneself almost naked in a sewer. Not to mention what the sea does to one’s skin and hair. Salt has its place, and that is in the kitchen. After a day on the beach I come off looking like a lobster that’s had an electric shock. I will probably have been bitten by something nasty, stubbed my toe on something septic, and have swallowed some sea water, which doesn’t bear thinking about.

I came across, in a manner of speaking, this early 19th century woodcut by Hokusai which shows the sort of unspeakable things that lurk in the ocean. It's put me right off calamari, I can tell you.