Dog days

After only a week, the heat is beginning to take its toll on the Londoners - famed for their tolerance of everything except the constant vagaries of the English weather.

The itinerant drunks who pepper the high street near my house look more jaded than usual, listlessly nursing extra large cans in paper bags on sun streaked benches. The seemingly hundreds of construction workers supposedly engaged in essential works on erupting pavements and roads laze together in groups of bare arms and high visibility jackets. They idly watch the guts of the city spew out of the holes they have made, perfecting their tans and trying their luck as young women in impossibly short skirts saunter by.

Taxis drive more slowly and traffic piles up on the escape roads from the baking city. Petrol fumed air filling the nostrils of tired mothers pushing limp children in buggies that have gained twenty kilos in the heat.

In the corner shop an old Irish lady, in for her twenty cigarettes and scratch card, laments the weather to the man serving her.
"It's lovely but it's too much", she says, shaking her head.
"It's alright if you're not doing anything" He agrees.
"It's alright if you're at the seaside. That's where I'm going come Thursday, thank goodness"
"Oh, there's rain coming Thursday."
"Oh well that's just typical isn't it. I'll have another scratch card, see if I can't win myself a place in the sun."