Yes, I do mean Alice as in Alice in Wonderland. She who, 150 years later, was to inspire plot-lines for Soaps and B-Grades with the (now) evergreen It Was All a Dream-ending for years to come.
And the reason I am referring to Alice is because, until those hot days we had recently, I never had completely understood how, on a hot summer's day, anyone could really fall asleep under a tree?
Not that I ever breathed this puzzlement to a soul: nothing I had ever read, seen or heard over an increasingly longer period of time, seemed to indicate there was a flaw in this reasoning. Everyone else obviously understood.
As this has undoubtedly been the status quo for around three quarters of a rather peripatetic life, one sometimes one has to get a grip on asking too many questions. The line people draw between eagerly intelligent fact gathering, and total imbecility, is shorter than you may realise.
But now, finally, like a bucket of iced-water over the head, I discovered that shade makes you cool!
Whoa!! Before you click off; wondering how this person who has not yet grasped the fundamental physics behind how her planet operates, could possibly string a series of cogent sentences together long enough for you to read them....let me hastily explain that, until 6 years or so ago, the sum total of my life had taken place on the Other Side. The Southern half of the world. Where people from the Northern half go for holidays to moan about the heat.
I have spent my life aware of the crucial part shade plays in our existence; always lived in houses where the shade factor is vital; understood the necessity for replanting where shade has been cut down; known it was the difference between life & death in some places if you wandered away from a broken-down car.
It protects from the harsh, death-dealing rays of the fierce sun, and it's reflection off stone and sand and parched, bleached earth.
But if you find a stunted Eucalyptus growing in a bare paddock and go sit down underneath it - if there are no red ants, green ants, scorpions, or snakes, lizards - the baked earth will burn your bum, and the temperature under the straggly branches will be no lower than in the rest of the paddock.
You just won't get dry-roasted and end up with blisters and sun-stroke.The same applies in town streets, and on beaches, and out the back of the Footie Club.
As for completely tropical climes, well humidity FLOURISHES in the shade! Your shoes go mouldy overnight. You get tropical blisters, if you leave the bed unmade it smells of mould and rot! But you never feel cool!
Of course in places where there's lot of shade there will be a few points difference - but once temps. reach a certain level, you can barely register the difference.
And then...my faithful but ageing companion, Boris The Brave, for the first time ever, was finding the heat disturbing. My small apartment boasts only three (yep. 3!) windows - in a straight line; there's no air circulation whatsoever and the Captivating Canine was distressed. As was his not-so-captivating human companion.
So even getting outside to the small breeze felt like a blast from an oxygen mask...and then we discovered (ok, "I" discovered. Boris The Brave was probably in the know all along. He's like that. Strong, but silent.)I discovered exactly how Alice and her sister fell asleep under a tree on a hot day!! And it's wonderful!
It was a hot day - up around 30. Such days don't affect me adversely - I just accept that being sweaty, and your hair sticking to your scalp like a rubber bathing cap, and standing with your arms akimbo so your armpits can get a breath of air; are all things that happen when the temperature is around 30.
Until I realised they weren't necessarily!
OMG! This may sound like an asinine claim to make at the age of...well, me.
I might sound like Simple Simon pointing out that shade is cool, but this has introduced a whole new dimension to summer for me! PLUS I finally get to understand something that the average child grasps within the first few years of life. Which is all part of my Fitting In, In the Frozen North plan. (Last year, after 6 years, I finally learnt how to Dress in the Frozen North. A life-changing skill.)
I'm still in a state of awe and wonder and this discovery! To think: it can be 30 there in that sunlight in the middle of a park, but I discover that lying on one's back in cool, lush grass (such as does NOT grow in Southern parts), staring up through a dense green canopy of a thickly leafed trees while the world sizzles around one is BLISS! And it's cool and comfortable enough for your hair to blow free, and your pits to feel dry, and to fall asleep and dream of white rabbits and lost gloves and playing cards.
Luxuriate in your blessings, people of the North. Drag your deckchairs into the shade and snooze peacefully beneath your cool, blissful, shady places.
And I promise I will go to the grave no longer reviling the purpose of shade in the top half of the world. The shade I had considered to be death-dealing patches of frozen dead space waiting to trap the unwary.
Life never runs out of surprises!
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