The power of prayerful washing-up

My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the same for them. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m sleeping all the time.’ ‘Oh, but so are we in this terrible heat!’

Meanwhile the young get browner and more beautiful every day while going on with their energetic lives as if affected by the heat scarcely at all. For instance, I look at the cheerful lads digging up our road, putting in fibre broadband in 40 degrees of heat. I want to run up to them and implore them, with the fervour of a dying man preaching to dying men, to enjoy it while it lasts. When I was a binman elderly people used to come to the back door and say that to me often. I’d be standing there, balancing a skip full of ashes on my right shoulder while the elderly householder warmed to his or her theme of carpe diem and out in the road the driver hissed his brakes impatiently.