Daily Archives: 28/06/2019

This is really just a local nature report, so don’t expect a punchline. We’re promised a heatwave from Europe this weekend. The papers were, of course, immediately blaming it on climate change, but you may recall that Irving Berlin’s Heatwave appeared in 1933, during the dust bowl years, and the Martha and the Vandellas song of the same name came out in 1963, and depended on people picking up the allusion. In fact 1962-3 was, in Britain, notably cold and snowy, and it wasn’t nearly as hot a summer as those I remember from the fifties. It’s called “weather.”