Karie Kahimi has loads of lovely broken English summertime lounge tunes up her sleeve, like “Zoom Up!” for example… “Does he love me? Tell me yes he do. Love is like camera. It stop him in my eyes…”

I pinch myself in the arm. No, I’m not dreaming, it really is this hot. Still. Us poor ungrateful Londoners are supposed to get only a week’s worth of sunshine per year, but this year someone must have drugged mother nature. The heat is on and it feels like someone lit a fire under my chair. I went outside earlier today to go open the sunroof of my car and upon leaving the house it was like stepping off a plane in California.

But I’m actually getting used to the heat now. I don’t mind it so much anymore but good lord I’d welcome a little snow right about now. The worst was still Wednesday of last week but things got pretty sweaty when I was out on Friday night in central London with my IC pals. We decided to go dine at Wagamama and upon getting seated we all realised something was wrong. It seemed that somewhere along the line we had all died and were now in hell. I looked up at the low ceiling above us and the undulating lights embedded into it but saw no signs of devils or pitchforks. The little alcove we were seated in was like a clay oven and it was only after the waitress asked for our order that she decided to inform us that the air conditioning there was out of commission. We sweated our way through 2 courses and decided that ordering and eating dessert there would be like mission impossible. It was so hot that I doubt the desserts would have been able to stay cool. To paint a picture, even the Fonz would have been struggling. Besides, ice cream is so much more fun to eat than just plain cold cream, so we nipped down the road to the Haagen Dazs café who, in trying to keep with the trend, also had non-fully-functional air conditioning. Luckily, with H’s great flirting negotiating skills we were able to secure ourselves a table on the ground floor right next to the few air conditioners working in the café. I’ve been eating ice cream everyday for the past week and I think it’s fast becoming an addiction. Although I still fit into my existing collection of pants, if this pattern continues I’ll soon be going to clothes stores asking for a “34 regular.” My abdominals even appear to have begun their regression underneath the extra insulation, noooooo! How long will this go on for? How do I make it all stop? Someone please hand me a Magnum to end the madness.

There was a staggering amount of people outside. For some reason, walking around outdoors in Piccadilly Circus/Leicester Square at 10pm seemed like a cool idea to thousands of people. I had never seen it so busy around there in the evening and had never before seen the Square so packed out, with all the benches occupied. I wonder why people even bother sitting around in that Square to relax. It’s not the biggest or nicest Square in London but you see people hang out there all the time. I mean, I understand people visiting New York and hanging out in Central Park just so they can say they’ve done it, but why would any tourist visit London to go sit in Leicester Square. I guess it’s an attempt to feel normal; to do something that everyone else does. Everyone just wants to belong, be accepted and stay a part of the human race.

An extraordinary piece of quirky trivia I learned over the weekend was that actor/singer Tyrese (of 2 Fast 2 Furious fame) has something in common with my mate Sanje. Both are large heavy-set lads, but that’s the obvious. If you scratch beneath the surface, the thing that would largely divide them from the rest of the population would be their fear of certain feathered animals. Tyrese has an extreme fear of owls and this could be categorised with Sanje’s extreme fear of chickens (anything feathered, really). Sanje’s least favourite time of year is of course Easter, when shops become saturated with decorations featuring cute baby chicks and wonderful cuddy poultry merchandise. Not realising that the extent of his phobia extends to inanimate dolls of chickens too, when we were in a gift shop we placed some cuddly toy chicks on his shoulders. Judging by his reaction of howling and high-tailing it out of the store we were able to deduce that we should never do that again. God forbid if chickens ever rule the Earth, the last place I’d want to be is fighting for the humans alongside him.

You might think with his phobia that he stays away from KFC. Wrong. He loves eating cooked chicken but upon the sight of a live one, will literally squeal like a schoolgirl. His phobia must be embarassing too, because he can’t even handle a photograph or a badly drawn picture of one. So Sanje is kind of like Tyrese who had to stop a scene in 2 Fast 2 Furious being shot just because there was a Hooters logo in the background. The most insane show of disdain for feathered animals came when we went to see Dude, Where’s My Car. You’ll remember that scene when the guys are attacked in their car by Ostriches. Yup, I won’t forget that scene either because along with the cast, Sanje too was screaming and shifting uncontrollably in his seat. I have to admit, I’d be fairly scared if I was being attacked by Ostriches and I haven’t even got a fear of birds, so I could only imagine the suffering he would go through. In Sanje’s personal hell, Satan would be a horned chicken (or even scarier, a horny chicken).