Heatwave half-life

A journal of château life - 21st - 27th June 2026

Sunday 21st June

Midsummer, the longest day, the sun circling us from quarter past five in the morning until quarter to eleven at night. Our patch of the earth full tilt towards its heat, the coolness of night just a small scrap of time. Not an ideal time for another heatwave.

Slowly I traipse up the wide oak stairs to the attics, the steps getting wonkier and wonkier as I climb. Under the black slate roof the heat sucks the breath from my body, prompting me to move fast, searching out fabric scissors, thread and my sewing machine, tucking the cords and cables under my arms and hefting it all back down again to the cool of the kitchen, the temperature easing by increments with every step.

I smooth the wrinkles from the fabric with my palm, straightening the pattern on the kitchen table and unrolling my tape measure. I have enough for three cushions for the sitting room and I’m determined to make use of this stifling day to get them made.

I find a video tutorial online so I can learn how to insert an invisible zip. I watch it twice, making notes to follow as I work. Sharp blades snip through the old floral fabric, the needle zig zags in and out, locking the raw edges to stop them fraying. Right side to right side, teeth up, zipper down, my old piece of tailor’s chalk marking lines to match up to keep things straight, the tinkle of pins falling to the floor.

The burr of the sewing machine and the rhythmic whir of the fan are the sound track of my day, punctuated by Tim and the boys sloping into the kitchen for snacks and drinks, all of them hiding in the shade of the house too.

I iron seams and push out corners, inch fluffy pillows into the covers, bashing them against my shins to shake everything into place, zipping up first one, then two, then three cushions by the end of the afternoon. A satisfying use of a day in the shade, another job ticked off the long list.

Monday 22nd June

Sleep is a shallow, restless thing, the air in our room thick and heavy. The temperature seems to rise in the darkest hours of the night, dense and cloying as if the earth has suddenly discharged the built up heat of the day into the air.

By 6am I’m in the garden, cutting flowers and dead-heading roses, no guests over night making it possible to crunch about on the terrace in the relative cool of the morning. The wheelbarrow piled high with faded flowers and wayward stems, bees buzzing, cats already draped in the shade.

By 8am we’re closing windows and pulling the heavy shutters to in an effort to preserve the scant breath of morning cool. Sylvie is here early to help get the rooms done before the heat gets too fierce. I’m grateful for this early start; our chores are finished by late morning and we have several spare hours to rest in the cool.

I leave turning on the oven to the last possible moment. I prep everything else first, hoping to limit the extra heat in the kitchen to as short a time as possible. Still, the temperature climbs fast, reaching almost 30c as I stand spooning melting garlic butter over chicken breasts turning golden in a hot pan. It’s a relief when the last plate leaves the kitchen and all there’s left to do is to wash up and turn down the beds.

Tuesday 23rd June

The garden is shrivelling before my eyes, a hot breeze joining forces with the fierce, ever-present sun today. The leaves surrender after just a few hours on the front line, despite an early morning watering, each plant hanging limply, stems sagging, edges crisping. I watch in despair not really knowing what to do. The petals on the white hydrangea by the kitchen door have been singed to a crisp, flowers curling and browned. It looks so ugly I’ll have to dead head it when it cools down.

I’m hoping it’s all a defence mechanism and the wilting is strategic. My poor dahlias, I want to stand over them to shade them from the heat but I have less staying power than they do. The thermometer reads 42c. My head starts to swim, my heart drumming against my ribs, my breath coming in shallow puffs and my limbs like dead weights. I have to retreat indoors to be cool, I am not built for heat.

Between us, Tim and I change the whole house after a night of one night stays. The washing machines churning through towels, sheets stripped and bundled into laundry bags, beds remade, bathrooms cleaned, flies and moths swept up after a nighttime fiesta around a light bulb.

We can only apologise for the heat, promising each new set of guests we’ve done our best, but we are currently a good 15-20 degrees hotter than our usual June temperatures and with the long hours of daylight the house just can’t cope, even with the shutters and metre thick walls.

Wednesday 24th June

The security guard on the gate at the Prefecture speaks to us from the hedge. He’s so desperate for shade that he’s almost in between the bushes poor chap. We give him our names and he ushers us through, grudgingly telling us to enjoy the air conditioning inside.

Inside, the high arched stone ceilings and tiled floors make us feel instantly cooler and we both let out our breath in a long grateful sigh. We’re here to collect our new residence permits, granting us a permanent right to remain resident in France; our thick dossiers of papers passing muster, stamped and filed in a huge vault somewhere no doubt.

Our finger prints are scanned, we sign a piece of paper each and the woman behind the desks swaps our old cards for the new ones. We are in and out in five minutes which feels like an administrative win. If it wasn’t so unbelievably hot I would suggest a celebratory drink, but all we can think of is getting home and out of the sun. We skirt along the streets, moving from patch of shade to patch of shade with everyone else, our movements almost vampiric, all of us avoiding the sun light, making our way back to the car and the countryside where the trees offer a little more respite.

Bees asleep on the dahlias

Thursday 25th June

I want to capture that shiver of a moment when I step out of the shower and the air of the bathroom skims over my skin, a cool breeze that feels like a distant memory. I want to capture it and keep it with me all day as the temperature climbs yet again.

The schools are closed, the trains are cancelled and paper notes with “fermeture exceptionnelle” scrawled by sweaty hands are taped to shop windows. Tim and I have talked, maybe a hundred times, about whether we could cancel dinner andnot cook for our guests? Whether people would mind if we just offered grazing boards all week? But we can’t bring ourselves to disappoint anyone when they’ve travelled so far to see us.

Keeping the house cool is impossible now. The sun is so ever present at this time of year that the night time temperatures are more like the usual daytime ones we’d expect in June. We don’t dip below 25c at night, rising well into the 40s during the day. The stone walls and old tiled floors have become heat sinks and each day the temperature inside rises by another degree or two, despite our best shutter management. It’s all becoming unbearable.

At first light in the cutting garden sweat is already beading on my forehead, my glasses fogging and sliding almost constantly down the bridge of my nose. Time and again I nudge them back onto my face with the back of my hand. Making beds in the late morning makes my breath come short and sharp. Any movement takes twice the normal effort.

The dark, shuttered kitchen is unbearable before I even turn on an oven to try and cook dinner. I feel myself becoming irrationally emotional, my throat burning as I try to hold back tears, a weariness flooding through my body at the thought of standing here in this heat all evening long. I can’t function, my brain feels overwhelmed by the heat and everything is usually do without thinking seems to take so much effort.

Tim drags an old portable air conditioning unit downstairs and stuffs its outlet pipe through the cat flap. He points a fan at me from the other side of the kitchen and trapped between the two sources of cool air the thick fog of emotion starts to clear, my brain begins to turn again and it feels just possible to organise myself enough to cook dinner for six.

As I cook and Tim shuttles back and forth with plates, now full, now empty, every conversation between us is short and to the point, our energy and humour saved for the guests. We communicate in sighs and huffs, eye rolls and groans of exhausted despair. I refresh my weather app constantly, willing it to change, but it doesn’t.

Friday 26th June

Thunder rolled and flashes of lightning lit up the louvred slats of the shutters, but the storm was distant, a freshening nighttime drink of rain a long way off. It was close enough though to make François panic about his freshly tedded hay and to have him out baling at midnight, the rumble of the tractor carrying through the thick night air, drowning out the crickets and the late night chorus of the frogs.

When morning comes the air feels a tiny bit cooler and I cling hopefully to this few degree drop. It’s not really enough though, I still have to sit down to catch my breath between making beds, giving my body a chance to cool down before the next round of effort.

It’s been far too hot for mowing lawns and as I carry heavy baskets of clean towels over to the gite I see that nature has been taking advantage of the absence of sharp mower blades. Wild salvias and spires of yellow agrimony stand tall over the neglected grass, while bell vine threads its way through the clover. In the cutting garden too the weeds are thriving, joyfully growing in the heat and thieving nutrients and water from my flowers. I’m desperate to pull them all up but it’s just too hot.

Instead I’m living a sort of half life, twiddling my thumbs in the shaded gloom of every afternoon, an exhausted malaise seeping through every limb. It’s too hot to do anything useful and my brain is sluggish, my eyes unwilling to focus on a computer screen, the words of my book even crawling across the page and blurring together like a swarm of ants. So I just lie there bored and frustrated, the interminable whirring thrum of the fan boring into my brain, trying to rest, waiting for the minutes to tick away until its time to brave the ferocious daylight again and welcome our next guests.

Quick strawberry ice cream and peanut butter cookies - a recipe

Saturday 27th June

I pull open the window as quietly as I can and cool air floods into the room, fresher, lighter, pushing its way through the fuggy heat. I breathe it in and feel my mood lift ever so slightly, the weather is finally starting to turn, the heat easing a little. Just another couple of days of hot.

I woke up thinking about peanut butter cookies and strawberry ice cream, of turning the crank handle of an old metal ice cream churn in my godmother’s kitchen on a trip to America many years ago. The kitchen, like mine, shuttered and dark, protected from the sun, the ice crunching against the barrel as the cream and strawberries swirled together inside. We sat on a dock, cooling our feet in the water, fish nibbling our toes, the ice cream sweet, the cookies salty.

I think about the cookies and the strawberry ice cream as I clear breakfast tables and make the beds. I think about them as I put another load of towels on to wash and when I fold them still warm from the dryer.

I pull a bag of frozen strawberries from the freezer and pour them into my food processor with some icing sugar and cream. The motor roars, the blades spinning through the frozen fruit, turning it to a creamy, pink puree. A quick ice cream, spooned into a box in the freezer to firm up a little.

My peanut butter is the worthy sort, thick and stiff with no added anything, so I mash it together with some sugar and salt and then add an egg to turn it into a dough. Rolled into little balls and flattened with a fork, they only need 10 minutes or so in the oven and a little time to cool and I have a tray of simple, salty, peanutty biscuits to sandwich the ice cream between.

A quick version of a memory from all those years ago, a sweet and salty treat for a hot afternoon, a cool way to while away some time inside when there’s no energy or motivation to do anything else. Tomorrow the weather will break properly and then we can get back on with everything we haven’t been able to do.

PS I’m terribly sorry about all the whinging about the heat this week, but as a red-headed English woman I’m really not built for it, it’s been a really a tough week. These temperatures at such a sustained level, at this time of year, really are unusual in this part of France. We chose northern France because we really didn’t want to cope with super hot summers, but it seems climate change has other ideas. I try to keep this journal as upbeat as possible, it’s important to me though that it’s a real, honest, record of the ups and downs of château life and this week was definitely a down week!

PPS Apologies for the lack of audio this week, technology appears to be on heat strike too!

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