Give Me the Snow

By 9 am The thermometer on the sign outside the pharmacy on Calle Mayor had already given up rounding to the nearest sensible figure and gone straight for the theatrical 37 degrees and it was still early. It would climb . Everyone knew it would climb, the way you know its going to be one of those days. It's etched in your memory from every other August, and yet this promises to give you an extra couple of degrees more.

This is a story about composure, and about how composure, once the mercury clears forty, behaves less like a personality trait and more like a battery. You start the day with some. You spend it faster than you think.

Phase One: Denial, Lightly Iced

The first questionable decision of the day is always made with total confidence. Lets call him Miguel, because that is in fact is his name. He decided that today was the day he would finally go for his run. Not later, not at 6 am, like a person who has met a summer before. Now ten in the morning, in August, in a t-shirt, that said Valencia 2019 in letters that had started to peel like sunburnt skin.

''It's fine,'' Miguel said, to no one, tightening his laces. ''It's a dry heat!''

It was not a dry heat. It has never once, been a dry heat. You see this is the great lie humans tell themselves in hot countries, the meteorological equivalent of '' I can stop anytime I want.'' It reminds me of three drivers in Mauritania. ''It's okay, it's a dry heat as their kidney's cease up.

Anyway getting back to Miguel, he made four hundred metres before a stray cat looked at him with what could only be described as professional concern.

Phase Two: Bargaining, with Household Appliances

Meanwhile, across town, a women named Concha was engaged in a more sophisticated form of self-deception trying to negotiate with her fan.

The fan, an elderly standing model with a wobble in its neck like an old dog, had two settings, off, and a sound like an light aircraft attempting an emergency landing in the living room. Concha had positioned it four centimetres from her face and was conducting an internal cost benefit analysis about whether the noise was worth the six degrees of relief, a calculation she revisited every eleven minutes without ever reaching a conclusion.

At some point she opened the freezer ''just to stand near it,'' a phrase every person in a hot country has said aloud to an empty kitchen. Hell I'm even thinking about it now as I type this. This standing in front of the freezer is usually followed by the frozen peas routine. Holding the bag to the back of the neck as if nursing a war wound. This is never about the peas. This is about proximity to anything, anything at all, that remembers what cold used to feel like.

By noon she had eaten the peas. Not thawed them for dinner. Eaten them frozen, straight from the bag, standing in the doorway of the fridge with the door held open by her hip, telling herself this counted as a snack and not as a coping mechanism, which is the kind of lie that only works if you say it firmly enough. Try telling that to your stomach as you're sitting on the loo at 4 am.

Phase Three: Anger, Directed at Physics

By early afternoon , the town has entered what meteorologists call '' the hottest part of the day'' and what everyone else calls '' a personal attack.'' This is the hour when strategy collapses into pure grievance.

Miguel, having abandoned the run somewhere around a minute six and walked the rest of the way home with the dignity of a man who has made peace with defeat, was now lying on his kitchen tiles. Not sitting near them. Lying on them, full length, face down, arms out, like a starfish that has made several poor decisions. The tiles were the only cool thing left in his life and he intended to make the most of them.

His neighbour Lucas, who had spent the morning insisting that the trick was mind over matter. '' You just don't think about the heat,'' was discovered an hour later sitting fully clothed in his shower with the cold tap running, still wearing his socks, on the grounds that taking them off felt like too much effort and also, somehow, like giving up.

We are now at the 43 degree mark. This is the stage where good ideas and bad ideas become impossible to tell apart. Someone always suggests wetting a bedsheet and draping it over the balcony rail like a makeshift flag of surrender to the sun, which does technically work. for about four minutes, after which it becomes a hot, damp bedsheet and a new problem.

Someone else every year, without fail decides this is the day to test whether or not an egg will actually fry on the pavement. I actually went for the bonnet of the car, a piece of research undertaken not out of curiosity but out of a need to prove that the heat has become at minimum, scientifically remarkable, and therefore an acceptable excuse for getting nothing else done.

Phase Four: Bargaining, Round Two, Now With Ice Cream

By four o'clock the town had converged, as it always does, on the one form of consensus heat can produce - ice cream, eaten too fast, in a manner indistinguishable from grief.

Concha was, three flavours deep, a decision defended on the grounds that ice cream ''melts anyway, so really you're saving time.'' While Miguel, sunburnt from his four hundred metre run, sat beside her insisting between mouthfuls that he was ''adapting to the local climate,'' a phrase that has never once been said by someone who is actually adapting to anything.

Lucas arrived last, hair still wet, socks finally removed and carried in one hand like a small defeated flag, and ordered the largest cone on the board on the grounds that if he were going to suffer, he might as well suffer at scale.

Nobody mentioned the eggs. The eggs had not fried. The eggs had simply gone warm and a little sad, but if you think about it, was the emotional throughline of the day.

Phase Five: Something Like Acceptance

The heat doesn't break so much as it loses interest. somewhere around nine, when the light goes soft and orange and the town exhales all at once, chairs scraping out onto pavements, someone's radio drifting from a window, the particular relief of a breeze that isn't cold so much as merely not actively hostile.

This is when the real talking starts. The kind that starts only when everyone has stopped trying to win against the weather and started simply comparing notes on how badly they lost. Miguel shows blisters. Concha admits to the peas. Lucas, sock carrying survivor, is roundly and correctly mocked, and takes it with the good humour of a man who knows he brought this on himself.

Phase Six: The Night Campaign.

Somewhere past midnight, in a flat two streets over, a women named Paloma proved that the day's real final boss doesn't arrive until the light's go out.

Forty degrees does not politely retreat after sunset. It moves indoors, settles into the mattress, and waits. Paloma had done everything right. Sheet kicked off, one leg dangled off the bed for ventilation, the specific starfish sprawl that every hot-night sleeper eventually adopts without ever being taught it. And then, right beside her ear, in the total darkness, a whine. Small. Personal. Deliberate.

A mosquito. The single most psychologically effective insect in existence, precisely because it never attacks, no it announces, then vanishes, leaving you lying rigid in the heat with every muscle tensed for round two.

She got up. She armed herself with a slipper, because there is no other correct weapon for this job and everyone who has fought a mosquito at one in the morning knows this in their bones. Light on. Nothing. The mosquito sensibly does not draw attention to it's self. Light off the whine starts again straight past Palomas' ear. Light on. There, at last, flat against the ceiling, smug and motionless, clearly under the impression that being six feet up made it untouchable. Paloma took aim with the slipper like a women defusing something, and missed by a comfortable margin, mostly because standing on a bed at one in the morning in forty degree heat does not lend itself to precision.

At this point composure did what composure always does around hour two of a heatwave. It left the building entirely. Sweating, defeated, done negotiating with either insect or the thermostat of her own conscience, she reached, for the fan. The fan she'd been rationing all week on principle, muttering something about the electricity bill every time she walked past it. She switched it on at full force with the specific recklessness of someone abandoning a diet at midnight'

To hell with the electric, she thought, lying back down in the artificial gale.

It turned out to be the correct call twice over. The fan did nothing for the heat that a hundred euros of good intentions hadn't already failed to do, but it turned out mosquitoes, rather sensibly, do not enjoy flying into a wind tunnel. The whine didn't come back. Paloma fell asleep at two under a fan she'd sworn all summer she wouldn't run past ten o'clock, having lost the argument with the heat, the insect, and her own budget in a single night, and won, somehow, anyway.

Nobody learns anything. This is the part that never changes. Tomorrow the thermometer will do its theatrical thing again, and Miguel will lace up his trainers at ten in the morning with the same unshakeable, evidence proof confidence, because the truth about heat and this is the real truth, the one nobody puts on postcards, is that it doesn't just make you uncomfortable. It makes you certain, right up until the moment it makes you cautionary tale, told fondly, over ice cream, by people who did exactly the same thing yesterday.