The endless asphalt and concrete heated my boots. I hobbled about,gulping cold drinks and getting light-headed. No breeze found its way into the city’s canyons. No relief waited in a hotel room - there was no air conditioning.
9Honey's UK correspondent Karishma Sarkari has captured why Britain's heatwave is more serious than Aussies might realise.
The memory of it returned this week.
Australians all over social media were handing out free advice as radio and TV reported that Britain was heading for a day of.
“It’s just a summer’s day,” shouted the clods. “We get 40 degrees all the time down here in Australia and we’re just fine. Get over it.”
The truth is that 40 degrees is close to unbearably hot for most of us,wherever we might be.
But in a northern kingdom where no such temperature had previously been recorded,it is heat-stroke territory. Many in Britain reportedly died. Hundreds more perished in France and Spain and Portugal,large areas of which were on fire.
The story was similar,or worse,across much of the northern hemisphere.
Central Asia suffered. Temperatures reportedly soared to 45.9 degrees in Kazakhstan on Monday.
By the middle of the week,US President Joe Biden was alarmed enough to issue an official declaration that “today,100 million Americans are suffering from extreme heat”,announcing his government would make “a historic investment in resilient infrastructure to help communities prepare for disasters like the heat waves we are seeing today”.
We are all capable of acclimatising,of course,though you don’t want to do it too abruptly.
I once travelled with an experienced news photographer who,shortly after we arrived in Cambodia,hovered perilously close to death after collapsing in the cloying heat of the build-up to the tropical wet season.
We are essentially hard-wired to survive best in the environment we customarily live in and understand. Those who live close to the earth know it without needing to think about it.
My father,having been raised in the country,never wore a watch,and his map was inside his head.
Like a lot of bush people,he could make his way through trackless miles of dense forest without risk of becoming lost,and he could tell the time - to the minute,usually - without bothering to glance at the angle of the sun.
Pedestrians shelter from the sun on London’s Westminster Bridge this week.AP
Yet take him to a big city and he was anxious and disoriented.
Those who live by the sea,as I do mostly these days,find its rhythms settle into their very being through mere proximity.
This week,lines of fat waves rolled in from apparently calm waters,expending their energy against our seawall. We knew intuitively that way across the bay off a particular rocky point,surfers were out in full-body wetsuits dancing on perfectly shaped winter right-handers.
Surfers can pick up the scent of a promising swell almost without rising from their beds. The direction of a breeze,the weather over the past few days,word of a storm far from sight;the sky,clouded or clear. The timing of tides seems to be hooked into their existence by osmosis.
Those who fish or take to the sea in boats pick up on the same signs. It can mean life or death out there,beyond the horizon,if your senses are not plugged into the clues.
Surf at Lawrence Rocks,off Portland in western Victoria.
A century-and-a-half ago my ancestors figured out the precise time they should leave town to get by horse and buggy to their distant farm simply by glancing at a particular rock sticking from the sea near the house where I now live.
Their trip involved a river crossing 16 kilometres along the coast. The height of the water on what we still call Shag Rock - cormorants perch on it,drying their wings - told them when the tide would be lowest by the time they reached the river,allowing them to ford it safely.
The point,of course,is our lives are best equipped by reliable knowledge imparted by the familiar.
That day years ago in London revealed the obverse.
I might have been accustomed and comfortable as an Australian to days in the high 20s or low 30s,but I wasn’t prepared for what that might feel like in one of the world’s larger cities in another hemisphere;I was a stranger.
This week,millions across Britain and Europe found themselves strangers to the heat afflicting their own lands - just as,in our southern hemisphere,whole communities of Australians have found themselves strangers to the frequency and magnitude of floods that have ruined their lives this year.
Fools continue to proclaim it is nothing but a spot of weather.
In Australia,we learn that a government - led by a man who now tells us - hid for months,awaiting the passing of an election,a report showing the nation’s environment is in disastrous,rapid decline.
The natural world,if we cared to listen,is furiously telling us that what we have known is disappearing. There is to be less and less comfort for us in the familiar.
Get used to it,came the message. We have ignored the clues too long.