In a development that will shock precisely no one outside the Met Office, Delhi has officially become a demon's armpit at 43.5°C, with the 'real feel' presumably calibrated by Satan's own weatherman. While the Indian capital melts into a puddle of rickshaw fumes and bovine despair, Britain's great and good have convened to panic over whether our own heatwave preparedness is worthy of a nation that considers 25°C a 'scorcher'.
Let us examine this so-called 'model'. It is, as far as I can ascertain, a damp spreadsheet kept in a Tupperware box under someone's desk at the Department for Levelling Up (which, ironically, has a poorly maintained air conditioning unit). The plan appears to involve handing out damp flannels and begging the sun politely to go away. Meanwhile, Delhi's citizens are surviving on a diet of chaat and defiance, their bodies adapted to temperatures that would cause a British train driver to spontaneously combust.
The sheer audacity of comparing our pathetic puddle of a preparedness to the furnace that is an Indian summer is staggering. We have heatwaves that last three days and conclude with a minor hosepipe ban. They have heatwaves that last three months and conclude with the pavement eating your shoes. Our National Health Service puts out a leaflet about drinking water while theirs operates on a scale of 'mildly uncomfortable' to 'the dead are piling up like discarded flip-flops'.
And yet, here we are, modelling. We have models for everything: economic models that failed to predict a single recession, weather models that can't tell us if it will rain in ten minutes, and now a heatwave model that will probably suggest we all buy a fan from Argos and call it a day. The sheer, unadulterated chutzpah of British officialdom never fails to astound. They treat a 30°C day like a national emergency, wheezing into the newspaper columns about 'extreme weather events' while the rest of the world just gets on with it.
But I digress. The real story is the disconnect, the yawning chasm between the reality of a boiling planet and the fantasy of a government that thinks a 'heatwave plan' consists of painting a few zebra crossings white. Delhi doesn't need a model; it needs a miracle. Or at least a monsoon that isn't just a tease.
As I write this, the gin in my glass has evaporated. It's 23°C in London and I'm pretending it's an ordeal. Somewhere in Delhi, a man is selling chai from a cart that's hot enough to fry an egg on its roof. He does not have a heatwave model. He has a wet towel and a sense of humour. Perhaps that's the real preparedness.
So by all means, examine your models. Tweak your spreadsheets. But until you've experienced the joy of a 43.5°C day with 90% humidity and a power cut, you can keep your British heatwave 'preparedness' and stick it where the sun doesn't shine. Which, given the circumstances, might be the only place left that's still cool.
