“Woah, it’s getting hot in here, must be something in the atmosphere”

I don’t know how to talk to people. I mean, I can talk to people, it’s not that hard. It comes out all awkward and self-deprecating and I can see the look in their eyes that shows them drifting off… I probably talk about the dogs way too much, but I don’t talk to anyone very often, so I suffer from acute verbal diarrhoea. The curse of a writer!

No, what I mean is, I have no conversation starter anymore. I’m British, we talk about the weather. We moan about it, we moan about moaning about it, we talk about moaning about moaning about it and make fun of ourselves. But regardless, we always talk about it. It’s a way in.

I don’t have a way in anymore. THE SUN IS ALWAYS SHINING. And actually, it’s becoming quite boring. People look at you mental when you say ‘ooh, It’s hot today!’ ‘No fucking shit Sherlock’, they’re thinking, ‘you’re in Dubai, it’s always hot’ and they walk away rolling their eyes and making a mental note to avoid me in the future.

I definitely can’t say ‘oooh, did you see that one solitary fleeting cloud?’ They’ll think I’m even weirder. I did talk about the brief rain shower we had when it rained with our British friends, but they weren’t in the country at the time, so that was short lived. Onto the topic of… um… erm… ‘so the dogs went for a walk today’… SMDH.

Problem is, I love the weather. I love clouds particularly; I’m the nerd with the Cloud Collector’s Handbook, ticking them off when I see them, taking a picture of a particularly beautiful anvil on a cumulonimbus cloud. (Stormcloud to the uninitiated.) Just the word quoom-you-low-NIM-BUS is fun to say. I saw one out here once, but there was nobody to tell. There was even LIGHTENING! Which meant I had to go home fast in case thunder followed and Roxy freaked out.

 

 

I love rain. Not for days on end obviously, that also gets a bit tedious, the smell of wet dog wears thin after about three days. No, I love being cosy inside, watching it stream down the window. PROPER rain. Not drizzle. Drizzle can do one.

We take a walk, the sun is shining down,
Burns my feet as they touch the ground. -Good Day Sunshine, The Beatles

This literally happens in Dubai. I’m going to be cooking eggs on the patio this summer.

I used to think the weather in the UK was boring mostly because we don’t get ‘real’ storms, or snow or anything. But actually, the UK weather is just right. Honestly, it is. It very rarely ruins everything (Ok, there are occasional floods, but they’re nowhere near the scale of other countries) and we have snow (which yes, stops transport and people get mardy about the fact we can’t cope) but it’s just the right balance of all the weather flavours to keep it interesting without being devastating.

 

 

ALSO, I would just like to mention that the reason we can’t cope with snow is that we aren’t guaranteed it, so why would we put a mega-infrastructure in place like the Nordic countries when that year we might not get any? Mind you, the government waste money on worse ideas so… I digress…

People think I’m mad when I say I’m bored of the sun, especially when it’s grey and gloomy in the UK, but I’ve never been into sun worshipping. Yes, it’s nice when it shows its face in the UK I agree, but it’s so much more special because it’s fleeting and MUST BE ENJOYED. When you’re all out in the sun, we’ll be shivering in our AC because it’s WAY TOO HOT to be in the sun. What is the point of that? Why have sun if it’s too hot to enjoy? WHY AM I HERE?

 

 

The other downside to it being perma-sunny is that I will age irrevocably fast in the next 3 years. ‘But you’ll only be 34 when you come back’, people will say. Yeah, true, I’m still ‘young’. However, I am a sweaty human, and as any sweaty human knows, using moisturiser is pointless because you just sweat it out and it makes being sweaty even more gross than the situation already is. So, all those little wrinkles on the forehead, and around the eyes, and the mouth are becoming a bit more noticeable. I also have dry ankles. Who has dry ankles? I’ve started trying to massage the sweat back in, in an attempt to at least provide my dry skin with some moisture.

 

 

 

And yes, I went with Athlete for the title, not Nelly, because Athlete are lovely, and it is getting hot because of something in the atmosphere. Well, technically not, the Sun is outside our atmosphere, but… I’m getting off topic again. Although come summer, the Nelly lyric ‘I’m gonna get so hot, I’m gonna take my clothes off’ will be literal, although not for the reasons stated in the rest of the song. It will just be too damned hot.

I was going to use a Violent Femmes quote, but I don’t want to blister in the sun really. Even if it is a distinct possibility.