I’m trying to describe to a friend how hot London was while I was there. Thirty-five degrees, I say, exaggerating only slightly.
But my friend is American and thinks in Fahrenheit and though I can instantly convert all other metric measures to imperial, I can’t do temperature.
Adult life in the Britain of my 1980s childhood still in practical ways functioned in imperial measurements – the road signs are even now in miles – but in school we were taught metric, which means that British people of my age convert fluently between ounces and grams, kilograms and stone, miles and kilometres. I learned to cook in ounces because that was what my mother and grandmother and their balancing kitchen scales used. The architecture of shame and ambition around body weight was expressed in stone, which is still how I think of it when I feel bad, though since I can’t do mental arithmetic in 1/12ths and 1/14ths I have to use kilos and centimetres for BMI.
Teenaged dieting in this binumerate, pre-mobile-phone world left many of us expert in mental arithmetic. All our mothers carried “calorie books” that listed all known foods (there were fewer then; the books fitted in handbags) with calories per ounce (16 ounces to the pound, for younger readers) but after a few weeks we had it all memorised, unforgettable. Food was beginning to be sold in grams, so we had to convert, rounding a little one way or the other according to self-loathing on the day.
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We knew our weights in the stone of our bathroom scales, but American magazines and teen fiction worked in pounds, of which there were 14 to the stone, and when we were good enough at dieting to attract medical attention our doctors used kilos, which are 2.2 pounds, 6.35kg to the stone, though how seriously our weight was taken depended also on height, known to our parents in feet and inches and to our doctors in centimetres.
I ran less then, but could still calculate calories per kilometre or per mile and convert the result into apples or toast, because in those days it was fat rather than carbohydrate that made you fat and all the mothers on diets were allowed bread and rice and pasta but forbidden meat and cheese and eggs, which made sense because those were the expensive things on which men had first dibs.
All of which is to say, much as these days I refuse to quantify my body’s needs, desires and displacement of air, I can still do all the sums, ran them so constantly for so many years that I have to remember not to. Perhaps it’s an advantage of outsourcing obsessive quantification to your phone that it’s easier to stop using apps than to stop your mind generating similar and equally destructive data.
But I never learned Fahrenheit, perhaps because it didn’t count anything the grownups moralised. You couldn’t be good by being hotter or colder. The oven had a dial but it went from ‘low’ to ‘high’, no numbers, and I knew from experience and touch what worked for different cakes and pies.
Thirty-five’s hot, I say to my friend, far too hot, hotter than it ever used to get here. Uncomfortable in the lightest sundress hot, sweating while sitting still. Think saunas. Hotter than anyone would ever choose. I mean, maybe not for you – she lives in Arizona – but here, for our bodies. With the humidity, she says helpfully, which is what people who cope just fine in far hotter places say when we north Atlantic islanders complain of excess heat. No, I say, even without the humidity 35 is bad.
Of course we could look up the numbers. We have phones – that’s how we’re having this conversation – but it becomes a game. Ice-cream would melt before you could eat it, I say. I’ve had to put my chocolate in the fridge. It feels good to pour cold water on your clothes, it feels good to have a cold shower, several cold showers. The cat’s avoiding direct sunlight, the bread’s rising in an afternoon.
I’m not suggesting that measuring temperature is a bad thing, though I can get almost as obsessive about the weather forecast in a heatwave as I once did about calories. But it’s interesting for once to step back from that shorthand and describe what it’s actually like to be in this body at this time in this place.
