The heatwave may have left, but fantastic visions followed in its wake. Across the British and Irish countryside, crop marks in the scorched ground revealed the subterranean outlines of undiscovered neolithic henges, a phantom 18th-century mansion and a second-world-war airfield, among other eerie sites. In Gloucestershire, the heat apparently encouraged a colony of rare Andean flamingos to lay eggs for the first time in 15 years. In my flat, a man with too many oscillating fans and free hours is wondering if he can convert them into a rotisserie chicken arrangement. I can’t quite pin down what I find so magical about these stories – or at least two of them – but they represent the last gifts of a summer that is tipping towards being over.

As soon as the weather dropped out of the mid 30s, I sewed myself into a hoodie and started mourning. I’m so fearful of losing things that I always fixate on their end. I can’t even enjoy a pizza, as the disappearing slices remind me of the clock in Countdown. There is no clear way out of this relentlessly tragic worldview. My takeaway from the flamingo story is that the eggs weren’t fertilised, so will never hatch. Loss is an unavoidable part of life, because we’re attached to outcomes and people and things, which Buddhists teach is the root of all suffering in the world. (Personally, I think having to reset my Apple ID every fortnight is the cause of all suffering, but accept this view is blinkered.) Maybe that is why I love these strange stories, these unexpected legacies of the good times, because they tell us nothing is ever really lost. There is room for more, and magic left.

I do believe that, although it is the first thing I forget. It is hard to make our peace with loss. I’ve had to learn to move on many times in my life, painfully. Yet, strangely, I’m not sure I’d change anything. I had to stop acting, the passion I thought was my only possible calling in life, only to later discover a selfhood in writing. Like many city dwellers, I’ve moved homes often, leaving places to which I felt a connection. I landed somewhere better every time, or at least somewhere different, better’s less judgmental cousin. I’ve said goodbye to lovers I believed I couldn’t live without. Here I am, still alive, a fact that bears its own sadness.

I remember when I lost my father, more than 10 years ago. I honestly thought I might never smile again, believing the world had nothing left to show me but pain. But I also remember, some months later, seeing a very elderly Ghanaian woman in Peckham Rye, London, screw up a receipt, throw it in the air and attempt to head it into the street bin, like a schoolboy. I couldn’t stop laughing at the sight. It still raises a smile to think of now. I had to report her to the council – she missed, and as such it constituted littering – but the point remains.

Seasons change, friendships fade, people die. But there are new relationships, jobs, houses, waiting to rise under the ground of your loss. Extraordinary things you know nothing about yet. That is why it’s good to make friends with the unknown. In the end, keepers gave those flamingos different eggs to brood and rear as their own, believing the experience will enrich them and encourage them to lay again. I don’t know where the new eggs are from: hopefully they will hatch a family of platypuses. Now that would be fantastic.

A good summer for Egyptology

Experts have discovered the ingredients that keep mummies well preserved, and they aren’t Snack a Jacks and gin. The earliest known Egyptian embalming salve, identified by chemical analysis of a prehistoric mummy found in Turin, has been found to contain sesame oil, plant gum, heated conifer resin and aromatic plant extracts. Unless they were reading the back of a bottle of Herbal Essences. Would anyone else eat the hell out of that? Or taste it, at least? That is my instinct when I don’t know what an object is. Sometimes it’s mouse poo, sometimes chocolate. But you have to live a little.



Because they decided not to follow the “just taste it” technique, it took the Egyptologist Jana Jones and her team 10 years of analysis to isolate the components of the balm. Incredible that there are people with names and jobs like this. Dr Jana Jones, who is surely, surely, the lead in a 2019 reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise, said the embalming salve would have originally been “a sticky brown paste”. That is not helping my hunger pangs. She could be describing Daddies sauce.

It has been a good summer for Egyptology and perverse eating compulsions. Was Jones also behind the recent discovery of the 2,000-year-old sarcophagus in Alexandria? The one filled with murky red fluid, that led to a change.org petition to “let the people drink” it, with nearly 35,000 signatures. The petition’s founder, Innes McKendrick, explained: “We need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die.” Which is the most beautiful summation of my philosophy I’ve ever heard. Sadly, it turned out to be sewage. But the will of the people must be respected.

I’m moving to a megaslump in Siberia

I’ve discovered the bleakest place on Earth! It’s a kilometre-long, tear-shaped sinkhole in the Yakutia region of Siberia called the Batagai depression, colloquially known as “the Mouth of Hell”. Bet the tourist board is delighted. The poison-gas-emitting crater was caused by climate change and its melting permafrost has uncovered the bodies of preserved bison and mammoths, so it’s a graveyard, too. Scientists refer to the immense, expanding void as a “megaslump”. Fellas, I feel you. Still, property must be cheap. Now that summer is over, you know where to send my mail.