Finally, I broke down and installed central air conditioning in my rental apartment. It has become indispensable. The landlord didn’t contribute one lousy centime, but after the torturous summer of 2022 I could not face 2023 without help to get me through it. This one is predicted to be worse, and longer, because of La Niña and general weather trends. So I have done what I can to be somewhat ready. The air con is in just one room and that’s where I will be confined when I am not escaping heat and humidity in cooler geographies.
The only way to countenance the cost is to think of it amortizing over five years. That means I won’t be moving from this apartment come hell or high water (we have a long-running drought so hell will arrive first). In a way, that takes the pressure off the decision “to stay, or not to stay.”
Speaking of hell, the water shortage in southwest France is so bad that firefighters had to use sea water to put out the first “incendies” of the fire season, which like everywhere else has been arriving earlier and earlier. (There are fires in the Urals and Siberia already, by the way.) The Sahara will, sometime after I am gone, reach here. We already have the climate hospitable to dengue and chikungunya.
The good news is that I will spend almost half of this summer elsewhere, in the mountains of Italy, in a small town in Ireland and on a lighting visit to Poland and Latvia. That’s not something I will be able to do with each passing year. As I said, good investment.