A Week Of Wilting In The Heat

Another week rolls by with very little really to report. We are well into August, and with it the temperatures are now really climbing. Yesterday in Málaga the temperature was 36 degrees at four o’clock - and that, of course, is the shade temperature. Here in Frigiliana it’s not quite so hot, but it still managed to get to 32 degrees, which coincidentally was the overnight temperature in my living room, as the aircon unit is playing up. Fortunately, the unit in the bedroom is working as it should, and so I can sleep in a comfortable 23 degrees; a temperature that, it occurs to me, I would have found oppressive for sleeping when I lived in the UK. At the beginning of the week we had quite a lively thunderstorm during the night. Lots of thunder and lightning but only a handful of fat blobs of rain. At this time of year that usually means only one thing, and sure enough the local newspaper the following day reported that a lightning strike had set of a fire in the mountains behind us that burned off three thousand square metres of scrub, before the helicopter crews finally extinguished it. That was only the second fire of the season; let’s just hope that it’s the last.