Hello from London on a 34 C bank holiday Monday. I’ve lived in hotter places; I’ve even lived in places that were both hotter and more humid; yet the UK remains one of the worst places to be in a heatwave. There’s little air conditioning, and British houses lack the thermal mass to regulate the temperature downwards. All they can do is keep the sun off, at best.

Friday was also hot, and I decided to spend it walking in the countryside. I followed Saturday Walkers Club’s Harlington to Flitwick route, cutting off a couple of kilometres between Priestly Farm and Flitwick at the end to get back home at a reasonable time. I don’t know the exact distance, but it was at least 20 km.

Large daisies in a grassy field on a sunny day

Huge daisies in a field somewhere near Harlington

I saw plenty of wildlife: a deer (possibly a muntjac); a cock pheasant; a couple of red kites; some kind of large raptor being harried by a crow until it flew away.

It was hot and tiring, but a good way to spend a day off.

We did half of our Sanshinkai practice in the park on Saturday. I appreciated the cool breeze, but I think the dancers appreciated it more. A few curious passers by came to watch and ask questions.

I restored an old film camera. It’s an Olympus Pen S, a beautiful tiny manual half-frame camera (i.e. it takes portrait photos that are half the width of a normal 35mm frame) designed by Yoshihisa Maitani in the late 1950s. I have the version with a 30 mm f/2.8 lens. I picked it up cheap, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing wrong with it beyond some degraded light seals.

I measured and cut new seals and installed them. As to how well it worked, I’ll have to wait until I’ve finished off the roll of film and had it developed, and even the 72-frame roll of film (two frames per normal frame) and had it developed. If they’re good, I’ll post the SVG templates for the benefit of others.

Someone from Openreach came to carry out the initial stages of fibre installation. They couldn’t get the cable to the front of our house, though, because the duct is buried under two layers of paving slabs. It seems that whichever cowboys installed the ugly paving in front of our house just laid them directly on a set of very similar ugly paving.

The suction device he used to lift the paving – like a reverse hovercraft that stuck itself onto the slab and provided a grab handle – was impressive, though.

They’re going to come back and install a box in the pavement in front of our house, but we still have to figure out how to get the cable across. Ideally, we’d get rid of the slabs entirely, but I don’t think that will happen in time, and if we don’t we’ll end up with an exposed cable run across the top that makes it harder to sort out the front garden in the future.

That’s all for now: it’s too hot!