The French apocalypse and politics stuck at the level of mild advice: adapt. But how?

We complain, but elsewhere they’re doubled over in pain. In France, for example. Fires straight out of a horror film and a heatwave that’s scorching even the souls of the dead. We’d long since realised that summer had ceased to be a season, and that now we need prayers to the saints and precautionary measures. 44 degrees, crops burnt to a crisp, nuclear power stations shut down, trains that, if they stop in the sun, cause a bloodbath. One day or another, the Eiffel Tower will melt, it’ll come crashing down, and we’ll all say, ‘What a great metaphor!’ Near Bordeaux, the flames have devoured hundreds of square kilometres and 200,000 people have been evacuated.

France, which until the day before yesterday had the perfect climate for butter and champagne, is now a greenhouse, with almost half of its homes ill-suited to the recent heatwave – those famous Parisian zinc roofs, so romantic in black-and-white films, are now only good for making crêpes, except that there are people living underneath them. The French government, in a state of emergency, has procured 30,000 portable air-conditioners for hospitals and care homes – units that often do not even fit the windows they are supposed to be mounted on. And then someone has the audacity to use that magic word, the trump card that gets you out of anything: adaptation. We will have to adapt. So they say, though I don’t know where they find the nerve. Above all, I don’t know which books they’ve been studying. Adaptation, as I remember it from primary school, is the domain of ambitious fish who’ve decided to leave the water and try to breathe. Monkeys climbing down from the trees, over the course of centuries developing opposable thumbs and, in a process not always worthy of praise, have got to the point of swiping on Vinted when the blouse isn’t the right size. Adaptation involves genetic mutations or new forms of mobility, special functions and, above all: millennia. Millennia are needed. It is not adaptation to ask a vulnerable individual with low blood pressure and anaemia (me) to become fire-resistant and queue outside non-air-conditioned courthouses in 40-degree heat within thirty-six months. Climate policy is still stuck at the advisory stage; perhaps, then, we need a catalogue of the adaptations required of the contemporary European, complete with a feasibility assessment. Let us carry out this internal pre-audit.

Sleeping with the air conditioning on. It’s not pleasant, but it’s useful. It’s pointless to think that if you set the temperature to 24 degrees you’ll reap nothing but benefits: you’ll still wake up feeling as flimsy as a wafer and with your nervous system all out of whack. Because what I’ve discovered this year is that air conditioning affects your mood: it soothes one part, but upsets another. In any case, a cost-benefit analysis is out of the question; we could discuss it if there were quick and effective alternatives, but there aren’t any. Chances of success: high. Rating: 10.

Sleeping without air conditioning. It’s the sustainable way. Except that you’re dying, night after night. You open the windows. You flip your pillow in search of the cool side – but there is no cool side. In between, there are no normal dreams, only hallucinations. Number of times you wake up drenched in sweat each night: 25. By the third time, you give up on changing your T-shirt. At six in the morning, you wake up so filled with hatred that it’s physically impossible to function; going to work is three times the punishment. Chances of success: not even theoretically possible. Rating: 0.

Skip going out with friends. Dinner at nine. Better still, at ten. At ten o’clock it’s still 35 degrees. Shall we eat indoors? But it’s summer. Let’s eat outside. Nobody can hold a conversation. Our clothes are stuck to us. We start to wonder if we ever actually liked those people around us; we say to each other, ‘never again’. The urge to go home is like the one in winter, multiplied by three. Chances of success: very real. Rating: 2.

Choose cooler destinations instead of the seaside. The new luxury is rather dreary: ‘you needed a jumper in the evening’. I have always been somewhat amused by those who sought a cool breeze after dinner. The affluent will return from their holidays looking pale. They will even dispose of their boats: it is sweltering even out at sea, and with those unpredictable storm cells, there is a risk of a Titanic-style disaster even for those merely heading to Ventotene. Chances of success: proportional to income. Rating: 8.

Get used to it. That’s the final suggestion. You have to be flexible, make compromises. You have to stand in your underwear in front of the mirror and give your body a pep talk. Let’s see if it’s convinced. The fact is, we have a critical temperature, a pressure and, above all, a limited amount of patience. And if I’ve learnt anything about patience from experimenting with my own, it’s that it can withstand any burden, any waste and an enormous amount of wear and tear, but it mustn’t be overheated, because it’s an alloy that evaporates. The body can acclimatise within certain limits. Could these summers be a formative experience? The first step towards adaptation? I’m inclined to doubt it. Chances of success: biologically negligible. Rating: 0.