Only this time last week I was sweating in PPE from places I didn’t even know I could sweat from. I came home from work last Wednesday evening, lay on our ceramic tiled kitchen floor, trying to soak up some of their coolness. A buzzing from my phone in my pocket was a friend texting me to ask if I had got home yet. Through a dehydration-induced, bleary-eyed haze I answered, yes, just. Moments later the doorbell rang. She had arranged a delivery of ice cream to help me cool down. She’s a very lovely friend.
While the heat wasn’t much fun for me, it was even less fun for many of my patients. Dealing with foul smelling leg ulcers, coping with layers of compression bandaging, or in the last moments of life, the heat was hard work. I wish I could have shared my ice cream with all of them.
But by the weekend we were drowning. We went from heatwave to Biblical-style thunderstorms in a matter of hours, and it hasn’t stopped raining since. Like so many things at the moment we booked our camping weekend in Woolacombe with friends well in advance due to Covid restrictions. We knew it would be a lucky dip weather-wise, it being August and all, still, I don’t think we ever thought it would be as bad as it was. Lying in our tent listening to the inevitable drip-drip of the pounding deluge making its way through the roof I couldn’t help singing to myself the lines of that old Sunday School song: “The rains came down, and the floods came up.” Down the road in Barnstaple, the floods literally did come up. Needless to say, our weekend camping was a washout. The following day the children decided they couldn’t get any wetter, so put on their wetsuits and ran into the sea.
Another advance booking was our trip to Paignton Zoo today. You spotted that was a tiger through the drips right?!
