Comic Cuts — 22 July 2022

Most of the readers of this blog are British, so, of course, we have to talk about the weather.

To understand the weather around here, you need to know a couple of things. Colchester is built on a hill. When the Romans came to Britain and built a capital city, Camulodunum, they built it on the hill, which was already the power centre of local ruler Cunobelin over 2,000 years ago. (A quick check on Wikipedia reveals that the gravel hill on which the town is built dates back to the Middle Pleistocene period, and ancient handtools and weapons have been found that have lain there since the Palaeolithic era.) The town is built around the River Colne, which flows out into the North Sea just down the road from where we live. The river in photos I've posted here over the years is the Colne.

This is a rather roundabout way of introducing our weather. The city (yes, Colchester is a city now) is one of the driest places in the UK, with around 25 inches of rainfall a year. I've always believed that some weather fronts skirt Colchester, maybe because it's on a hill, based on  the definitive scientific evidence of my Mum mentioning it is raining in Chelmsford and it not raining here in Colchester 20 minutes later. I now think this must be wrong, as Chelmsford's annual rainfall averages 1 3⁄4 inches less than Colchester; my new theory is that Colchester is getting more rainfall because its climate is affected by Continental weather patterns and its proximity to the North Sea.

What all this means is that we didn't suffer the worst of the recent heatwave, although I do believe we hit a new record temperature. Colchester's previous high was 36.1°C (97°F) back in the summer of 2003.

With weather reports warning us that things were going to get hot, hot, HOT! after the weekend, Mel chose to work from home for a couple of days, so we reverted back to our old pandemic habit of taking a walk down to the river in the early morning. I had a relatively easy job to tackle — the second pass over the scans I had been cleaning up, which doesn't cause anywhere near the tension that was causing problems during the first pass. Thank Dog it didn't,  because the last thing I would have needed was a heat pad when the temperature hit 35°C.

With the doors and windows open throughout the house, curtains closed and plenty of water to drink, the office didn't feel too uncomfortable. The dry heat of the days gave way to a more humid night temperature that had only dropped to 33°C at 7 o'clock and was still in the high twenties when I tried to get to sleep.

Tuesday began at around 22°C and was ten degrees hotter at 10 o'clock that morning. The temperature peaked here at 37°C and hit 38°C in Colchester, smashing the record set almost two decades earlier. The peak in Coningsby, in Lincolnshire, was 40.3°C (104°F), which made it news in the USA, where presenters seemed shocked to learn that most houses don't have air-conditioning. We've never really needed it before, but we're going to in the future — the ten hottest years since measurements began (1884), have all happened since 2002. We do have a large fan that we sat on the floor in front of us so that it blew cooling air onto our bare legs as it swung back and forth. That and the ice creams we treated ourselves to did the trick.

The heat of Tuesday night/Wednesday morning was still excessive... we had been promised thunderstorms, but all we got was a few low rumbles and no rain whatsoever. We still haven't had any. Come on rain! We have tomatoes that need you.

The next set of scans is now in the works. I completed the last book on Wednesday when I finished the introduction, and then spent the rest of the day copying files around on my computer and external hard drives in order to make some space for the next book, plus a Windows update that inconveniently arrived just at the wrong time. So I've switched from Spider to Steel Claw. It's cooler, nights  are far more comfortable, the weekend isn't far away... life's good!