2003-07-15 - 11:36 a.m.

At the moment, I�m mostly listening to the Hidden Cameras. Could there be a better summer soundtrack than beautiful, delicate, gay church-folk music about piss sex? I don�t think so.

So the best manning and wedding speechery went surprisingly well over the weekend, the several large measures of Pimms I managed to neck before getting up doing just the trick of calming my nerves. Luckily, it was the hottest day since Moses, so everyone was in a nicely advanced state of refreshment by the time I took the stage, and towards the end I was even looking up from my cuecards for more than three seconds at a time. Outside the whole public speaking thing, being a best man is almost as good as being the groom, as you get to wear the costume, bask in relatively nice amounts of attention and have drinks bought for you all day but without that whole bowel-troubling lifelong commitment thing to contend with.

In case you don�t live in England�s green and pleasant land, we�re having a cancer-baiting heatwave here, with the papers full of reports about places we�re hotter than. �Temperatures soar higher than Sydney / Buenos Aires / Rio de Janeiro, etc�, the fact that these places are in the southern hemisphere and therefore currently midwinter seemingly irrelevant as the press insist on branding us the new Mediterranean, as if the old one isn�t bad enough. Pasty Brits are notoriously ill-equipped to deal with the scorching weather, anyway. Continentals endure the heat with style in their linen suits, summer dresses and fashionable sandals, whereas we approach the brutal sunshine with expectations of sunburn, a diehard fixation with the continued wearing of socks and cardiac arrests on public transport. We�re very good with light rain, however.