Summertime (and the living is HOT)

I'm beginning to understand the English obsession with weather.

Polite conversation here centers on current meteorological conditions. Whereas in LA one might open with "How about them Dodgers?" or "Did you get caught in that SigAlert on the 405?," in London small talk consists of how bright the sky is or how grey the clouds.

It's taken me a while to adjust. Particularly as my usual small talk fallback in LA - "What a cute purse/pair of shoes/necklace/shirt!" - feels rather, well, taboo here. One just doesn't discuss the accessories of others. Perhaps it is a comment on how shallow, consumerist and focused on appearances my former hometown can be, where females (and not a few men) regularly bond over purchases from Bloomies. And truth to tell, life in London, free from the pressure to look like an ad layout for Anthropologie or J. Crew or Barney's New York, is quite refreshing. But I still felt conversationally hamstrung - until I got the hang of studying the BBC's weather webpage every morning. Now I have proper conversation topics and can get through the morning "how goes it"'s with ease.

And the current topic occupying our chat? It's HOT. Over 80 degrees Fahrenheit hot.

Wait! I hear you say. Aren't you from California? Southern California, to be precise? Isn't 80 degree weather, like, y'know, normal everyday temperature for you?

Well, yes and no. First, I lived and (for most of my adult life) worked on the Westside. Ocean breezes kept most summer days a temperate 75 or so. And on the days when the breezes came from the desert and baked the city into triple digits or more, you could always look forward to nightfall and the heat dissipating with the sunset. LA is arid, with low humidity, which means no moisture to trap the day's heat.

And LA is also a young city, built up primarily after World War II as the defense industry and the film community alike moved in to take advantage of said weather. Therefore, most buildings are familiar with the concept of air conditioning. Central air, even, not just those units that make walking underneath windows in New York City in summer such an adventure.

London, not so much on the air conditioning. The Tube - see last year's blog entries of talk about how Dante-ish the Tube gets in summer. Busses - why give them windows that open if you aren't going to use them? Stores - hit or miss, mostly miss. We joked this weekend that we wanted to move into our local M&S Simply Foods, simply because it had the strongest A/C we'd felt all weekend. Our flat - oh please. Let's be glad the heat works in winter and leave it at that.

It was gorgeous this past Saturday. The sky was deep blue, perfect and pure, not one cloud to mar it. The light was hard and bright. The leaves on the trees, past their chartreuse first growth and now a darker kelly green, threw jagged shadows on the sidewalks. We walked through all four Central London parks - Kensington, Hyde, Green and St James's - on our way to Convent Garden to grab lunch. The World Cup just started and the streets were deserted as people gathered at home or in dark pubs to match the England-Paraguay match. We could follow the game by the noises we heard as we walked by the various pubs. It felt odd to be in the West End on a beautiful summer day with few fellow pedestrians in sight, but it was lovely to almost have the city to ourselves. And Covent Garden itself was as crowded as ever.

We lived mostly outside this weekend, sticking to shade and following the breeze, as inside the flat it was a sticky, humid oven. This is leading to a crisis in my marriage: Do we sleep with the curtains open and the fan on, to bring the somewhat cooler night air into our second (or first, if you are British) floor bedroom; or do we turn off the fan and close the curtains as the sun comes up at 4:43 a.m. and hits us square in our sleeping faces? Decisions, decisions...