Heatwave? It’s all Johnny Foreigner’s fault!
Once upon a time there really was a HEATWAVE. For months. It was called 1976.
Nannying train companies (Abelio East Anglia) didn’t exist and British Rail did not hand out water as AES are doing today. London Underground did not dispense the ground-breaking information that if you feel ill you should get off a train and seek help. Instead we simply appointed Denis Howell as Minister for Drought – and the heavens opened immediately.
Yet now – for One Day Only – we have “killer heat” panic fuelled by tabloids making sure we know it is all Johnny Foreigner’s fault.
So the tabs rave about hot air coming maliciously in “from the continent” where “continental air pollution” will be dragged here resulting in the current mass death threat.
Clearly we make no home-smoked pollution, obviously it’s all filthy foreign stuff.
Only in the UK could a weather event which happens every single year (temperatures of more than 30c) be given racist overtones.
The general idiocy has been growing for some days. BBC Radio 5 (of which I am a fan) telling us two days ago that today would be “hotter than Rio de Janeiro” where the Brazilians are currently suffering from a phenomenon known as winter.
Today’s Telegraph bangs on about the nanny state on the one hand and then dispenses its own brand of How Not To Die In The Killer Heat tripe.
TV weather bulletins will – yet again – pretend these islands end at the Home Counties and will show (yet again) shots of Brighton Beach where there isn’t a beach and where there isn’t a story.
The rest of the sort-of-United Kingdom will once again look on at London media idiocy and sigh as one might at a toddler unable to conceive of a world beyond the playpen.
For the elderly, and those with medical conditions, who are genuinely vulnerable to the heat – this advice is obviously absolutely necessary and should be disseminated as widely as possible.
But for the rest of us? Can we walk through the streets in direct sunlight in the middle of the day, and flagrantly break government guidance?
Right now I am writing in a cafe in central London. Two people have just passed by, no water bottles to hand. I confronted both, recognising my civic duty in this national crisis.
After a few seconds it was clear one was openly Spanish and the other eventually admitted, under questioning, to being Portuguese. When I asked them why they were risking death like this they laughed at me.
All of which shows the struggle we are now up against in Britain as the next vital and lethal hours approach. It is not just Foreign Deadly Killer Heat but foreigners too, openly setting this kind of dangerous example to impressionable British youngsters.
Fortunately our national character will stand firm against this threat and Britons will be consistent in facing down The Threat.
Thus, just as the wrong sort of snow will necessarily slow our reassuringly expensive rail network in winter, so today the wrong sort of sun will necessarily slow our trains again as the rails threaten to buckle under the heat.
That, my friends, is the kind of stoicism Johnny Foreigner will never comprehend as he swaggers, waterless, around our lethal streets.
Looking up, I see it’s clouding over. Looks like we’ve had the best of the day.
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