There can be no more topical subject for a ramble than the recent heatwave, so let me add my own two pennyworth. Even as I sit and write, the grass verges (which have held out bravely for longer than I expected) are turning hay coloured.
I usually say I enjoy warm weather just as long as I can sit and look at it from somewhere nicely shaded. Alas, my recent experience has given the lie to this. Some days it has been too hot to sit outside no matter how well shaded the spot.
I was fortunate that I finished my post-graduate teacher training at the end of May 1976. Yes… at the start of the long, hot summer of ’76 (as the media insist we call it). My first teaching post did not start until September ’76, so I had a perfect summer in which to spend my last days of ‘freedom’. Heat did not worry me in those days; I just got on with life as usual. No doubt, I should have been being advised to slap on factor 85,000+ sun block, but these things had yet to become part of a national obsession.
Fast forward to 2026. Am I coping so breezily with the heat now? No, I’m not. I can’t sleep with recent bedroom temperatures varying between 30 and 34 degrees Celsius. I might just as well try sleeping in a sauna!
My brain cells have melted away into a sort of soup. There’s information floating around in there like croutons, but can I get it into any sort of order? No. It’s not so much a case of brain fog… rather more of a brain peasouper.
When I arrived at my first teaching post in Croydon in early September, I was boarding house tutor to a house of 11-13 year old boys, most of whom were at boarding school for the first time. They arrived in the afternoon and were slowly settled in to be ready for bed at 7.30. At 9.00 that evening, the long, hot summer came to an end with a colossal thunderstorm. It raged on most of the night, and, at one point the chapel spire was struck by lightning, and the clock housed therein decided it would chime 78 o’clock. (To be honest, I didn’t count how many times the clock struck, but that’s how it felt.) There was no sleep for anyone that night. The youngsters were torn between fear and bravado, but they certainly were not tempted to sleep.
About 5 in the morning, the storm eventually subsided, and a couple of hour’s sleep were grabbed before it was time to be up at 7.
My very first day of ‘real’ teaching was, accordingly, performed by a semi-catatonic teacher to classes of similarly unresponsive and sleep-deprived pupils.
I mentioned above about the grass turning brown recently. I attach a picture of one of the school quadrangles on the day I arrived. I think you can see just how parched things were by September 1976.
