Boozing in the sun can lead to ejection from Wimbledon finals – or falling asleep in your clothes two days in a row. I’m only guilty of one of those
I’m going to call her Wimbledon Lady – partly because she does not deserve for this to be the first thing to come up on Google under her real name for ever – and partly because that’s what she is, now. The lady who went to Wimbledon, drank Pimm’s forgetting it had alcohol in it, then drank rosé in the heat, then got kicked off centre court by Nick Kyrgios, who asked the umpire, irritably (but maybe not unreasonably) how he was supposed to serve while being heckled by someone who’d had “700 drinks”. It wasn’t 700, it was two, but let me introduce you to some heatwave maths: every alcoholic drink has the effect of 350 drinks.
The Met Office made a big show last month of launching an extreme heat warning, which should chill us as it is a herald of climate change, but it is very hard, under these conditions, to feel anything but hot. What does the warning actually say, though? Increased risk of water-related injury, as people who don’t know how to swim jump in the sea anyway, caught between that and the devil. And look out for older people, which isn’t a warning, exactly, more of a diplomatic plea to the fit and healthy not to be jerks, for once. I did actually heed it, and asked my mother if she wanted a fan, and she said yes, but unfortunately I can’t go to the shop because I’m too hungover.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
