Cor Wot a Scorcher

It's been in the 90s here in the last few days, which if you're in the UK means over 30ºC, because it seems that in the ten years since I left home everyone now refers to temperatures using Celsius only, and gives me a blank 'I no speak your Yankee language' stare if I even utter anything about Fahrenheit.

This was not always so, people. I swear I remember talking about temperatures being in the 'high 80s' when I were a lass, but then again, thinking back, I did grow up in North Yorkshire, and 'high 80s' and 'North Yorkshire' are not often mentioned in the same sentence unless it's to talk about population age.

So, yes, it's been warm - scorchio even. Anna's been wearing her shorts, breaking out those deliciously chubby toddler legs which seem to be getting leaner by the second. There's even been talk about starting up our ocean swimming next weekend, but you don't have to be a geographer to know that sudden warm weather coupled with a very cold ocean means we'll be knee-deep in fog in no time.

Fog always makes me laugh. Google that I dare you!

Many years ago when my fellow geographers and I were newly matriculated at up-your-own-arse-bridge we were all discussing our horrific entrance interviews thinking probably quite rightly, that if we were the ones picked then either,

a) Nobody else applied
b) We were the cream of the crop. Not bloody likely.

We each had our mortifying stories but the one that'll always stick with me was from C. To cut a very long story short, one of the questions he was asked was if he could think of any recent news stories that might be particularly pertinent to geographers. I can just visualize Dr. Blah asking the question and thinking 'don't say the rainforest, don't say the rainforest', but ha! no! C. had something much better up his sleeve. At that time a good answer would probably have been the fall of communism, something about the post-Soviet states, or even better, something based on Dr. Blah's highly esoteric and yawn-inspiring papers etc, but no, when asked of any important geographic phenomenon C. said.....

'there's been a lot of fog about'.

Needless to say I don't think any of us is doing anything remotely related to geography in our present careers. In fact the word 'career' might be stretching it a bit for most. And yes, for the record, I said 'rainforest'.