9 hours ago
I don't need interfering traffic wardens telling me how to behave
We've been waiting for this moment for eight months. Until a few weeks back, in our patch just off Exmoor, it had been raining since around September 20. Raining, blowing, chilling our bones and sogging our fields. I don't need official statistics to tell me about precipitation levels. I run a supper club from my old cow shed and, during autumn and winter, a spring mysteriously appears. Water floods the floor and I duly pump it out. I stopped pumping a couple of months ago. And now, some warm weather would be nice so my guests can dine on the outer part of the barn, which, unusually, they couldn't last month as it was too cold.
Now there is sun, lots of it, glorious lashings of the stuff, drying the ground, the fields and the footpaths. The wedding season is upon us, soon the thwack of tennis balls will echo around the All England Club at Wimbledon and at Ascot this week, temperatures reached 32C. And it's not over yet – the UK Health Security Agency has issued a four-day amber heat health alert which began on Thursday and will stretch to this Monday.
But nanny is not amused, nanny is concerned, nanny is on the warpath. Not mine, but ours, the state nanny. Nanny state has dusted down her cloak of hysteria and is back storming the wards. Here comes the advice, sorry, the warnings. The NHS website declares 'when it's hot, there are health risks'. The same advice, presumably for when it's cold. Dare I ask if it offers advice for when the weather is sort of normal, there being health risks the moment you wake up in the morning, if indeed, you managed to make it through the night.
'The main risks posed by a heatwave are,' it continues, ' not drinking enough water ', which it explains is a thing called 'dehydration'. There's a link so you can feast yourself on more detail. And then the statements of the obvious rise to a glorious crescendo. There are tips: 'Keep out of the heat… wear a hat… avoid activity that makes you hotter… cool yourself down… have cold drinks.'
There's also a helpful list of vulnerable people, which includes older people and people with serious illnesses. Who'd have thought such people might need extra care? Good job we have nanny to keep us on track.
The mercury tips 30 degrees celsius and government agencies warn us to lie down, stay inside and douse ourselves with water. This, in spite of the fact that when this warm weather stops in a week or so and it starts raining again, we'll all be off to Greece and Spain and the south of France where the mercury will be nudging 40 degrees.
And because the NHS won't be on hand, nanny state won't be parading the beaches and issuing dire warnings, we'll all get it horribly wrong. We'll go out in the sun and, as soon as the breakfast buffet has been cleared, drink as much alcohol as possible in an attempt to both enjoy ourselves and forget that we come from a country run by interfering traffic wardens.
