Not on your nelly Dorothy Fields

You may have noticed it has been quite warm in Spain for a while now. As I write, the word heatwave is on lots of people's lips; French lips, British lips, Portuguese lips and more. Spain is on fire too but we touched on that a couple of weeks ago. While it's a bit unusual to have such high temperatures in Paris or London it's not that unusual in Madrid or Culebrón. It seems pretty obvious to the casual observer that odd weather events are becoming more and more frequent. The weather's gone mad or, as we say in these here parts, el tiempo ha vuelto loco. Maybe we drove it mad.

Those of us who live in Spain walk down the shady side of the street, look for the tables in the shade and often choose to eat inside a restaurant. We prefer to be coddled by the aircon, rather than go hand to hand with swarms of pesky and hungry flies under the sunshades on the terrace. It sometimes seems to me that Spaniards can take this to quite extreme lengths. Go on a coach and they will instantly draw the window blinds - no watching the world slip by. I'm never convinced about the efficacy of blinds down and doors closed on houses in the afternoon heat - I prefer a bit of airflow - but Maggie, my partner, is a true believer. She's not quite as sold on starting the concerts at midnight.

What made me think about this sun versus shade thing was watching a car being parked today. The driver had to do a lot of close manoeuvring, climb a kerb and, when the car was finally parked, shuffle over to the passenger door to get out of his car. All to take advantage of the dappled shade offered by a small tree. But he thought it was worthwhile.

The incident reminded me of when I used to work in Cieza. My colleagues always parked their cars together on the waste ground outside the school and I got into the habit of doing the same. I was nearly always there first because I worked the morning shift too. One day when we went out to collect our cars, I found my car abandoned by the others; my colleagues cars were parked in a different spot. I asked why. The answer was that as Spring became Summer the shadow of the nearby blocks of flats moved across the parking area. When we started at 3.30 pm in the afternoon they were already thinking five hours ahead and plotting the sun's course across the sky. By the time we got out of work at 8.30 pm their cars had been in the shade for a while and had had time to cool down. I should have guessed really. Earlier, when I worked in Fortuna, a man had been quite sharp with me for parking in the sun. "There's space around the corner in the shade", he chided, "don't be stupid and move it there!".

Oh, and Dorothy Fields wrote the song On the Sunny Side of the Street, the music was by Jimmy McHugh.