When the sun is out and the weather is hot, my office shed becomes sauna-like long before midday. By 11am, I retreat to the kitchen to work. By noon, the kitchen is also too hot to work in, and I move to the living room, where I find the oldest one and the middle one sitting on the sofa in the dark, their faces illuminated by their laptop screens.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the place to be,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only place to be,\u201d says the oldest. \u201cMy room is like an oven.\u201d<\/p>\n
I have learned over a period of years that if I keep all the curtains shut, night and day, the living room will stay 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house in sultry weather. On certain days it becomes the only habitable room. Today is one of those days, by no means the first of the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI picked the wrong day to work from home,\u201d says the middle one, typing furiously, eyebrows knit in concentration. \u201cI could be in an air-conditioned office.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMe too,\u201d says the oldest one, sipping from a steaming mug.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you drinking?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cTea,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cHot tea?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cHot drinks keep you cool in warm weather,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo they don\u2019t,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel cooler,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I don\u2019t,\u201d I say. \u201cI can feel the heat coming off your cup from here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a meeting,\u201d says the middle one, standing up.<\/p>\n
We spend the next four hours like this, with one of us occasionally leaving the room to conduct some private work business, only to return 20 minutes later flushed and sweaty.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is kind of depressing,\u201d says\u00a0the oldest one. \u201cCan we open the\u00a0curtains?\u201d<\/p>\n
Through a gap in the curtains, a thin stripe of sunlight shines on the wall. It looks as if it could set the paint on fire<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I say. \u201cLook.\u201d I point to a spot on the wall where, thanks to a small gap at the top of the curtains, a thin stripe of sunlight is shining on the opposite wall \u2013 a stripe of such intensity that it looks as if it could set the paintwork on fire.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan we have the tennis on?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
At some point the dog wanders in, crossing in front of the tennis with a\u00a0rubber ball in its mouth, eyeing the three of us expectantly.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody wants to play with you,\u201d I\u00a0say. \u201cIt\u2019s too hot.\u201d<\/p>\n
The dog releases the ball, which bounces once and lands in a boot. The dog tries to retrieve the ball and gets its head stuck.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d says the middle one. The dog looks his way, with a boot on its head.<\/p>\n
After the boot is removed, the dog squeezes itself into the gap between the sofa and the wall behind, and collapses there, panting. My phone pings once: a text from my wife.<\/p>\n
\u201cMum will be home in half an hour,\u201d I announce. \u201cAnd believe me, she will have things to say about the present arrangement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The match we\u2019re watching goes into a fourth set, which eventually progresses to a tie-break. Inevitably this is the moment my wife picks to walk in.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s happening in here?\u201d she says. From behind the sofa, the dog\u2019s tail thumps twice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working,\u201d says the middle\u00a0one.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re watching Wimbledon,\u201d she\u00a0says.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust like in a real office,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t have the tennis on in real offices,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen were you last in a real office?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen were you?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s my point,\u201d I say. \u201cIt could be exactly like this, for all we know.\u201d There is a terrible scrabbling sound: the dog is trying to find its way out from behind the sofa.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still don\u2019t understand why it has to be quite so dark in here,\u201d says the oldest.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s ice-cream melting in the back of the car,\u201d my wife says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis match is on a knife edge,\u201d I\u00a0say.<\/p>\n
Just before dusk, I allow the curtains to be opened for one hour, at which point it becomes clear that the room is in a terrible state: there are cups everywhere, cables running underfoot and shoes strewn across the floor alongside little piles of now unidentifiable things the dog has chewed up in the dark.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t live like this,\u201d my wife says.<\/p>\n
\u201cMe neither,\u201d says the oldest one. \u201cI\u2019m definitely going into work tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
At 2am I cannot summon sleep in the tropical reaches of our bedroom. I\u00a0think about taking my pillow down to\u00a0the welcoming coolness of the living room, but I can hear the oldest one still watching telly in there, unable\u00a0to sleep himself. I pick up my phone and look at tomorrow\u2019s weather, which promises more of the same. Then I\u00a0think: but there\u2019s cricket tomorrow as well, all day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the sun is out and the weather is hot, my office shed becomes sauna-like long before midday.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-5522","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}