Cold Storage

I was recently WhatsApping my friend Jaja in London when she asked how the weather was. I immediately replied that it was freezing.

            “But how can that be? It’s the tropics, no?” said Jaja, who is French and therefore makes everything she says sound super sexy simply by adding a ‘no?’ at the end of every sentence.

            “It’s the monsoon! It rains all day and the temperature drops to like 22 degrees.”

            On the screen, her image looked astonished. “Twenty-two! But 22 is so hot, no?”

            “It’s freezing, Jaja!” I assured her. “Last night, I slept with all the windows closed and under three layers of blankets! My friend Sharyn wears thick socks around the house!”
            Jaja frowned. “That can’t be right. Are you sure you haven’t mixed up the thermostat or something? How can 22 be cold? You’re exaggerating, no?”
            “It’s cold, Jaja!” I repeated.

            Amanda says she’s stopped telling her overseas friends about our wintery weather. “It’s just too embarrassing. People think I’m completely loony. But really, they have no idea how cold it’s been!”

            I remember the first summer I spent in London. We’d just started emerging from a particularly long and difficult winter. It had snowed endlessly. The sun would rise weakly around 9am and never get beyond a dim light through the day on account of the constant pall of clouds that cloaked the world in a perpetual gloom. It was always 10 degrees but it felt like five. At 4pm, it was dark again. By 7pm, I felt I was ready for bed, but I hadn’t even had dinner yet.

            “I can’t wait for summer!” everyone would say as they trudged through the short cold grey days of alternating drizzle and snow. This is what hell must be like, I thought, peering out through the window, wondering if I would ever see the sun again.

            Eventually, spring came around. The flowers started pushing their way up through the frost as the days got longer, but the thermostat rarely went beyond 15 degrees on a good day. I switched from thick woolen scarves to thick silk scarves, and put on a thick jumper instead of my usual Uniqlo thermal vest.

            “Oh, it’s so nice to be warm again!” everyone said. Privately, I rolled my eyes.

            Then one day, I looked outside the window and saw that the thermometer read 25 degrees. In the parks, the English took off all their clothes to lie supine on the grass like beached whales.

            “What are they doing?” Saffy asked me. She was wrapped up in a padded parka, a knitted scarf and a hat.

            “They’re sunbathing.”

            “But it’s freezing!”

            “The English consider this sweltering.”

            “Shut up!”

            My friend Tony joined us for lunch. He walked in wearing shorts, tee-shirt and flip-flop. “My God, it’s so hot!” he announced, his voice like cut crystal on account of a childhood spent in very expensive boarding schools where his classmates had been the sort of people whose parents are usually seen on stamps or who wave from the high balcony of their palace.

            “I am so cold!” Saffy said, warming her hands around a cup of hot chocolate.

            “It’s just suffocating!” Tony went on. “How are you wearing all those clothes?”

            When Jaja heard we’d had lunch with Tony, she practically swooned. “Oh, I just adore him! He’s so sexy, no?”

            Saffy looked doubtful. “Really? I barely noticed, I was so busy trying to keep warm!”

            “But this is a heatwave, Saffy!” Jaja said, a statement which Saffy greeted with shrieks of laughter. “No, I’m serious! Someone in the West Midlands died of heatstroke! Stop laughing! Why is she laughing, Jhay-son?”

            “You people kill me!” Saffy hooted. “Twenty-five degrees is what I set my air-con to in Singapore! You don’t die of heatstroke at 25!”

            Years later, when the thermostat in our little flat in Singapore showed 22 degrees and we were indoors shivering in socks and cardigans, the memory of our first heatwave in London kept us all amused.

            “That woman did not die of heatstroke!” Saffy insisted.

            “That’s what the newspapers said.”

            “Fake news.”

            Amanda said it’s a wonder the Brits stayed in Singapore as long as they did. “They must have really suffered in this heat.”

            “Hey, what ever happened to Tony?” Saffy asked suddenly.

            “I think he married Lady somebody or another.”

            Saffy sighed, her bosom deflating. “Imagine if I’d spent more time on him instead of my hot chocolate. I could have been married to Prince Harry by now instead of that Markle woman.”

            “Yes, so close!” Amanda told her.