Bicycling up Regent Street in the intense June heat last week, I was cut up by a black cab driver. When I remonstrated with him, he leapt out of the cab and assaulted me, with a violent shove in the small of my back, trying to push me off my bike.
It was the heat that did it. The driver wouldn’t have deserted his snug cab — and his passenger — if it had been raining. But, in the longest heatwave in more than a decade, he went stir-crazy in his confined space, as the black paint of his taxi absorbed mind-altering quantities of ultraviolet rays.
He isn’t the only one who goes bonkers in this weather. When summer heat strikes the British, it morphs into summer madness. Noël Coward got it right in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’: ‘The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts/ Because they’re obviously, definitely nuts!’
Still, at least the English knew how to dress for the heat when Coward wrote the song; it was first performed in New York in 1931 — in June, incidentally, when Manhattan turns into a baking hump of agonisingly hot rock.
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