A day so hot that even a Pan Galactic Gargleblaster can’t help

Originally posted on Rob's website www.robhopkins.net

On the hottest day in May ever recorded in the UK, breaking the previous record not by a fraction of a degree as usually happens, but smashing it by a full 2 degrees, I headed to Stalbridge in Dorset for the annual Don’t Panic Festival. Stalbridge is where Douglas Adams wrote most of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and the festival is an annual celebration of his legacy. And damn it was hot, somewhere north of 32 degrees.

I was invited by This Living Place CIC, doing amazing community development work in the town, to run a workshop as part of the festival. This Living Place describe their work thus: “We are a community-led organisation rooted in our rural place, working together to create what’s needed for ecologically and socially thriving futures. We bring people together, turn ideas into innovative projects, and build the infrastructure that makes transformative, community-led work possible, locally and alongside communities across the UK”. Noble and timely work indeed, all infused with lashings of radical imagination.

‘Hitchkhikers Guide…’ fans wandered around with towels and dressing gowns, drinking Pan Galactic Gargleblasters, and other impressive book-themed fancy dress. And it was hot. Did I mention that? I was asked to give a short talk on the main stage in order to drum up interest in the workshop I was giving an hour or so later. I started with the first few lines from ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’:

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea”.

I told people that while it may indeed be “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet”, I am rather fond of it, and that the temperature today is not normal. The reality is we may well come back to look at this as being the coolest May of the forthcoming decade, but this is absolutely not right, not normal. I said that although the festival is called ‘Don’t Panic’, now might actually be a very good time to panic, and to really grasp what’s happening to the world around us.

After an iced hot chocolate and an hour in the shade, it was workshop time, in a small marquee at the edge of the site. As you might imagine by now, it was very very very hot, although the tent did offer at least a little shade. I was definitely a shoe-in for the ‘Speaker Most Resembling a Tomato’ prize. About 40 people joined me for a workshop that ran for almost an hour and a half. We time travelled, we played games, we dived into the power of longing and why time travel is an activist’s best friend.

One of the participants (see photo above) was an older woman wearing a think purple embroidered coat, with the words ‘Wizard Gran’ written on it. How she didn’t just collapse on the spot is beyond me. Maybe she’d had a few too many Gargleblasters. I managed to emerge from the workshop having not suffered heat stroke, which in itself felt like a major achievement. Lots of nice feedback from people, and nobody actually melted in front of me or spontaneously combusted, which was also a win.

Thanks to Laura, Deanne and the rest of the crew for inviting me and looking after me, and to Laura for fetching me water halfway through the workshop and thereby quite possibly saving my life. I drove home listening to the BBC Radio news which seemed to mostly consist of vox pops of people on the beach in Portsmouth saying how much they were loving the heat, and what a nice ice cream they’d had. It did feel rather like they were missing the vast elephant in the corner of that particular conversation.

I dropped into a village shop to buy provisions for the ride home, got into a conversation with the woman in the shop about how hot it was and I said “well this is what climate change looks like”, to which she replied “I very much sit on the fence with climate change”. I point out to her that there was no fence, just one bunch of qualified people who do actual measurements and actually know what they are talked about, and on the other side a bunch of oil industry-funded grifters and liars, but I could sense I was getting nowhere.

As I headed home, it still hadn’t cooled even at all. It was hot. Very hot.