Desperate Measures

Too hot again. Too damned hot again! We should have got used to it long since, but what our minds and reason tell us doesn’t always get through to our bodies – or is it the other way round?

     I don’t know. I don’t care. I just know that I feel drained of all my energy, and even that is just some atavistic turn of phrase because I don’t really remember ever having feeling as if I had any energy.

     If I did have any energy, and not just some surface façade of it to do the things I have to to get through the day and keep to some kind of routine , then I might be agitated enough to vent my anger, or at any rate my irritation, at the we are to blame droners and harpers. 

     I am not to blame. My parents were not to blame. My grandparents. Well, maybe. In some small part. But even resenting, if I had the energy to resent, this collective guilt implication, I can’t wholly avoid it myself.

     But right now I don’t want to dwell on moral issues and hypotheses. I just want a tranche of dreamless, sleep, not drenched by sweat and waking wearier than when I fell asleep.

     Perhaps to some people the we means scientists. But as many scientists warned, even if ineffectually, and hypocritically. I feel some vague, vapid, urge to defend scientists. At least sometimes. I am not one. I have a cousin who is, though he says himself (and if it’s self-deprecating or in hope of absolution I don’t know) only a geologist, and that doesn’t really count, either way. But Tom and I get on, in our way. Some folk think we’ll end up as an item, might even have some kind of ceremony to mark it, though not in the old way. There are those who still cling to the vestiges of that, but most folk just can’t be bothered. 

     No, I’m an infant school teacher. It’s okay. I have no especial passionate vocation for teaching, and no overwhelming love of children, but I can tolerate both, and am as good at it as anyone else is at their job nowadays, from the president to the dustman. And with an equal degree of, or lack or, enthusiasm. 

     I sometimes don’t know if I feel sorry for the children or resent them a little for what’s not their fault. Often both or neither. 

     One thing teachers and parents can never agree on – should we tell the children about days that were mild and cool, and times when seasons changed, and times when there were colours, so many colours? For my generation, they were at least within living memory of people we knew, but as these children grow up, that will cease to be so. So why torment them and frustrate them? And yet, to them, are such things any more real and any more taunting than tales of magic carpets and wishing trees and pumpkins turning into carriages were to preceding generations? We don’t even know how long they will live.

     Come to that, we don’t know how long any of us will live. It’s true that after the falling rates of longevity that lasted for decades, the last couple of years there has been a slight rise. But they may just be what statisticians call “outliers” and are only a matter of months anyway. 

     Yet we conquered so many diseases. Conquered them with vaccines and surgery and medication. But that was not enough. Unless someone has been in an accident, you rarely hear anyone say they died of something, of appendicitis, or septicaemia, or cancer or a virus, or whatever. Just that they died. Or that they’re gone. We know what has killed them.

     Perhaps my generation, the one that could still talk to people within living memory, will turn out to be the last one to know much about history. I don’t mean about kings and queens and presidents and wars and treaties, but about our history. About the history that has solidified into a solidified brick wall of the present.

     Some people took what they called the warming very seriously. But maybe not enough people, and maybe not seriously enough. Others denied it or even proclaimed its advantages, spoke of northern slopes with vineyards and tropical blooms in temperate climates. Most thought it probably “was a thing”, as they said, the wealthier among them bought electric cars instead of petrol or diesel ones, and offset their flights by having some trees planted. 

     And then the bees started to die off. At first it was put down to something called “colony collapse”, which was one of those expressions that suddenly everyone seemed to know and to bandy about, and to use of dangerous weedkillers. Well, they may have played their role. But in truth they were only hastening it.

     The people who said, of course it was a shame, but it was hardly a catastrophe, were shocked out of their complacency soon enough – and when it was already too late. When bees become an endangered species, so do humans. We know that now.

     Finally, governments took action, at first almost apologetically, their spokespersons having earnest and homespun faces, and trying to pull of the trick of convincing people of a situation’s desperate urgency without setting them off in a panic. They took what they called desperate measures,  and at first there were protests and riots and keyboard warriors referred to hysteria and virtue-signalling.

     The worst of it all, I remember my grandmother telling me, was the realisation that it was not going to have its time, and people only needed to ride it out. After the most horrendous of wars or terror attacks, things get back to normal because they have to, cities are rebuilt, old enemies make pacts with each other. Waters subside after a normal flood, and winds abate after a hurricane. Vaccines and treatments are found for health emergencies. Gradually or suddenly, folk wake up and realise that though things are not the same, and though a high price has been paid, things are okay again, and that fear is over.

     This got worse. Scientists must find it deeply ironic that the more people trust them, the worse any situation is becoming. Science became the saviour. It was as if populations were turning to them, frightened, like children with a pain or in the dark begging Mummy or Daddy to make it better.

     And it seemed as if the miracle had happened! Temperatures stalled, at first, and then they began to fall. More bees were sighted. Dessicated flowers bloomed once more and glorious, wonderful rain clouds filled the sky. The international team, between them, won every Nobel Prize on offer apart from Literature and Economics, and some said that looking at it long term, they certainly deserved the latter.

     Temperatures carried on falling, but at first nobody minded in the least. It was a simple joy to be able to buy a nice coat again, to watch children making snowmen, to feel crispness in the air instead of that sapping heat that managed to be both arid and humid. Some folk even opened up their hearths again and nestled round crackling log fires. After all, logs didn’t count as fossil fuels, not really, did they?

     Years passed, and days shortened and lengthened again, and spring came, and dawn broke early. But midsummer dawn broke early to illuminate frost-hard grass, the pale sun having no effect on it. For a while, yet, there was delusion and making the best of it, and upbeat interviewees on TV said how marvellous it was to go sledging in June.

     Nobody seemed quite sure who first came out with it, in private or in public, and said that something had gone wrong. That it had been too good to be true, and in defeating the warming, the team who had seemed like miracle workers had evoked perpetual winter.

     Adaptability is, in itself, a kind of pragmatic desperation. Resilience a form of denial. But we cared more about making sure our boots were warm enough and our heating was working than we did about contradictory slogans. You can get used to anything, and learn to live with it.

     But now I am so very tired, and so lethargic, because this heatwave has lasted for too long, and like everyone else, I don’t have the practical means to cope with it. 

     This morning the weather forecaster warned us that the temperatures might stay above zero degrees Celsius for the next week!