Town mouse on keeping cool in the city

Despite Clive’s insistence that some doors should be left open at night to create drafts, the childrens’ fear of London burglars means the family continues to swelter

Town mouse; country life
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(Image credit: Country Life)

I am having a war with my children over doors. Usually, parents want them to be shut, but, as London swelters through a heatwave, I am forever opening them. Ideally, the front door to the square and the back door to what we optimistically call the garden would stand permanently open as the garden is, in reality, a yard at the bottom of a canyon of London stock brick into which sunbeams rarely venture, a draft of cooling air would thereby refresh the bottom of the house.

Opening the door to the roof terrace would disperse hot air among the chimneypots, and the members of the Aslet family would sleep as crisp and cool as a £50 note. We have a kind of portcullis across the area door thus, the roof terrace is inaccessible to marauding burglars except by parachute. Yet, whatever I say, I cannot convince the children.

Any external opening is seen as a possible entry point for intruders, viewed not as corporeal beings, but as a miasma, capable of penetrating any crack. No sooner do I open doors than they lock and bolt them, hiding the key.

If global warming continues, however, it will also bring an unwelcome form of cooling to Pimlico, once a marsh. The Thames is almost at the top of the Embankment as it is. We’ll get our feet wet if it rises any higher.

Country Life

Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.