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Two thousand, seven hundred souls. That is the number – not a poetic flourish, not a parliamentary exaggeration, but an estimate produced by learned minds at Imperial College, the Meteorological Office, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. More than 2,700 people are believed to have perished from heat-related causes during the exceptional warmth of May and June in the Southern Kingdom and the Principality. Around 550 in the May heatwave alone, and nearly 2,200 in June – the warmest June on record in the Southern Kingdom, when temperatures reached 37.7 degrees at Lingwood in Norfolk, shattering a record set in 1957. This Author does not reach for wit here. She reaches, instead, for something approximating awe at how very small we all are before the sky. The heat dome – that stalled canopy of trapped hot air, worsened considerably by human-induced climate change – did not distinguish between the hale and the frail. It simply descended, and stayed.
And now, this Monday, comes word that the Kingdom’s third heatwave of the year intends to intensify further. More places in the Southern Kingdom and the Principality may exceed thirty degrees, with the mid-thirties possible in select locations. The Crown Health Security Agency has issued amber and yellow heat health alerts until the evening of the fifteenth. Meanwhile, wildfires have broken out with alarming enthusiasm across the Southern Kingdom and the Principality: a mountain blaze in Conwy forcing evacuations and declared a major incident; moorland fires near Dovestone Reservoir in Greater Manchester; a wildfire at Tintwistle Moor in Derbyshire that has been burning since the twenty-fourth of June and shows no particular sign of courtesy towards those who would extinguish it. Hampshire, Durham, West Sussex, East Sussex, Devon, and Somerset have also been touched. This Author notes, with the weariness of a woman who has watched the summers grow fiercer year by year, that the Kingdom was not built for this. Neither were its houses, nor, it seems, its contingency plans.
In rather more encouraging scientific news – and one is grateful for any – the Crown Medicines Authority has granted permission for trials of a new Ebola vaccine, developed by Oxford scientists in the astonishing span of eight weeks. Eight weeks! This Author has known houseguests who overstay their welcome for longer than it took these researchers to construct a potential answer to a killer virus. The vaccine is the first of four under development to enter clinical trials, with the first doses expected to be given to fifty healthy adults aged eighteen to fifty-five within weeks. The Ebola epidemic, centred on the Democratic Republic of Congo, has killed 625 people with 1,792 confirmed cases – caused by the Bundibugyo species, for which no approved vaccines previously existed. The technology is the same platform used in the celebrated Oxford-AstraZeneca remedy of pandemic fame. Science, it appears, occasionally moves faster than a man of influence fleeing a scandal, and to considerably more admirable ends.
On the matter of Lady Widdecombe: she was found dead at her home in Haytor, Devon, on Thursday, having sustained serious injuries. She was seventy-eight. Devon and Cornwall Police have arrested a twenty-eight-year-old white British man in Rotherham, and confirm they are not seeking anyone else. Officers from Counter Terrorism Police North East and South Yorkshire Police made the arrest; and yet the police are at pains to state there is, at present, nothing to suggest the killing was politically motivated. The force describes itself as remaining open-minded on motive. Neighbours in Rotherham described armed officers arriving on Saturday night and removing a man from the property, along with – various reports suggest – a red car and an object described as a wooden stick. This Author offers no theory, only the observation that a woman of strong opinions and considerable decades in public life deserves the full and swift operation of justice, and that the Kingdom will be watching.
And finally, a story to lift the spirit on a Monday of considerable gloom. Freya Terris, seventeen years old, of Lisburn in County Antrim, has passed her Grade Eight piano examination with a distinction – performed entirely with her left hand. An injury two years ago rendered her right hand unable to play; surgery has since followed. Rather than abandon the instrument she loved, she explored the considerable canon of music written specifically for the left hand, rebuilt her technique from the ground up, and sat before an examiner of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music to demonstrate what stubbornness in the service of beauty can achieve. She is, the board believes, the first pianist ever to have done so. This Author, who has occasionally struggled to manage a fan and a lorgnette simultaneously, finds this achievement quietly magnificent. There is, it turns out, quite a great deal one can accomplish with half of what one expected to have.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.