It’s hot! They are saying today will be the hottest June day since 1976. I remember that year well and 1975, the year before, which was very hot too.
I moved to London in early 1975 and during that summer I was living in a hostel in Westminster near Victoria Station. I was in a tiny room on the third floor. It was like an oven that summer. I would have the window open wide but it was still hot.
There was no fridge, and the only cooking facilities were a single hob with a grill under it shared by the whole floor, about 16 rooms. They provided a cooked breakfast but that was it. I was lucky. I was working at The Royal Opera House in the box office and they had a subsidised staff canteen, so I was able to get a hot lunch there and would queue in the evening for the tiny cooker to make something on toast or make a salad.
Alternate weekends I visited my mother in Bognor Regis, thankfully it was cooler by the coast. Weekends in London I often went to the Kentucky Fried Chicken to buy lunch, or bought one of these packets of fish you could boil in a bag and had it with some tinned peas and instant mashed potato. I had a kettle in my room but milk was a problem. I used to buy small cartons from a machine at the railway station. As there was no fridge I would put them outside on my window sill at night but often that didn’t work as it was so hot.
Coping with heat nowadays is entirely different. I am much older, of course, and I probably wouldn’t survive in a small third floor bedroom in the middle of London, but I am in a cottage in Herefordshire so I am ok. The cottage faces north west so the living room doesn’t get too hot until mid afternoon then I put the fan on. I don’t go outside until early evening when I water my very thirsty garden.
I haven’t written an entry here for ages. I’m still finding it difficult to concentrate. I don’t know why. Our situation is much the same with Hubby dividing his time between here and Cardiff with Louise. He’s really fed up with it.
We did get to go to our John Denver club in April. That was a lovely two day break. Numbers are dwindling now owing to us all getting older, but we had an enjoyable day of music and quizzes and catching up with old friends.
The next morning some of us were invited for coffee with the friends who organised the event and who lived close by. We spent a pleasant two hours chatting and seeing around their rather unusual garden. It was full of trees, mainly maples, planted around a large fish pond which they told us they had created partly to keep their cats amused. There was netting over the pond so that the cats couldn’t actually catch the fish or come to grief trying. They had three cats, one of them was one of the most beautiful cats I have ever seen. He is a Norwegian forest cat, large with masses of long fur. I was very struck by how much his face resembled our Suki. I think she may have some of that breed in her. The second cat was a Maine coon. We never did see the third one who was apparently very shy and hiding under the bed.
After the visit with our friends we enjoyed a lovely lunch at a local garden centre where I was able to find a beautiful pink azalea for Louise’s birthday.
It was my birthday in May. I went with Chris, Andrea, Tony and Dakota to a local rare breeds park where we saw a lot of different kinds of owls, sheep and goats. You were allowed to feed the sheep and goats and Dakota had a wonderful time. Afterwards we went back to Chris’s where Andrea had made pizzas and a delicious cake. She is a great cook. On a different day Hubby and I went for a birthday meal at a nearby garden centre and the following day we went to a steam rally. That last day was very hot and we only stayed a couple of hours but not before I had bought a number of plants at the plant stall to join the ones I bought the day before at the garden centre after our meal. I have planted quite a lot of them, there are still some to do, not sure when that’s going to happen as it’s currently too hot to go outside for most of the day.
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