London swelters...

[lethargic_man]

The sensible thing to do would be to stay in my airconditioned office as long as possible. But I find I like leaving work and coming home. Go figure. *shrug*

So far it's been cool enough to sleep without problems, at least, though I'm not sure that will last the next two nights, before the heatwave breaks.

There are speed restrictions on the Tube, due to warped tracks. Honestly, they manage all right in countries with much higher annual heat variations than here (anywhere in the interior of a continent, for a start); why do we always have to make a mountain of a molehill?

I've been watching the grass outside work gradually turning yellow. It's entirely yellow now apart from odd clumps, plus in the shade of park benches and along the edge of the tarmac path (I wonder what causes the last of these)—most unaesthetic. Perpetual greenness is one of the things I like about England (and a not insignificant factor in why I do not wish to make aliyah. Mind you, in countries where there's limited supplies of water, like Israel, they learn to make efficient use of what they've got. Here we famously have 150-year-old leaky water mains beneath London, and despite Thames Water advertising about how much loss they've saved, they're still losing 894 million litres a day, and missing their own targets.

Comments

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Maybe the ground at the edge of the path is generally wetter on account of collecting all the water which runs off the path when it rains?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought at first, but it's not a very wide path—only six to eight feet—and it's scarcely rained this year at all.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Well, okay.

Maybe the roots extend under the path, where they wouldn't get so dried out what with surface evaporation being pretty tricky through a layer of tarmac?

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Other countries manage because they're working to different specs - in countries with moderate climates, extremes aren't planned for, which is why the roads are melting, the railway tracks expand beyond what they can cope with; powerlines will probably give in sooner rather than later as well...

And as long as water pipes are sunk a foot beneath the ground, it takes two men with a spade to create a water feature.

I've been watching them for the past two hours. The local water company sent a man out who came, said 'yep, that's our water' and went away again.