Siobhan O’Donnell’s diary on heatwave exhaustion, band rehearsal chaos, and a satirical article that hit closer to home than expected
There’s a piece doing the rounds this week about a woman who’s apparently merged, physically and permanently, with her pleather sofa during the current heatwave, and I read it on the top deck of the bus to rehearsal, sweating through a leather jacket I refuse to abandon on principle, and thought, with genuine and slightly alarming recognition, that I understood her completely. Not the merging part specifically. The general vibe of having simply stopped fighting the heat and accepted whatever fate the sofa, or in my case the practice space’s one working armchair, had in store for me.
What Rehearsal Actually Looked Like This Week
We rehearse in a genuinely airless room above a defunct minicab office in Camden, no windows that actually open, one fan that makes a noise like a dying seagull, and this week’s session involved all four of us taking turns lying flat on the floor between songs purely to avoid overheating, a practice we’ve started calling, with real affection, “the recovery position,” borrowed loosely and somewhat inaccurately from actual first aid terminology.
The Actual Musical Content, Buried Somewhere in All This
We did, eventually, get through a genuinely solid run of the new set, three songs we’re finally happy with after weeks of arguing about tempo, though I suspect at least forty percent of our current tightness comes from nobody having the energy to argue anymore rather than any genuine creative breakthrough. Heat makes you efficient in ways actual discipline never quite manages. Nobody’s got the energy for a proper row about whether the bridge needs an extra bar when the alternative is simply melting where you stand.
Why the Sofa Piece Actually Stuck With Me
Good British satire has this specific gift for taking something genuinely, mundanely miserable, in this case a brutal, ongoing heatwave nobody asked for, and finding the exact detail that makes the whole thing suddenly, properly funny rather than just grim. The sofa piece does this perfectly, treating a woman’s total physical surrender to her own furniture with the same deadpan seriousness you’d expect from an actual news report, and somehow that seriousness is exactly what makes it work. Go read it directly on the Daily Mash if you want a genuinely accurate document of what this summer has felt like for anyone without proper air conditioning, which in London, let’s be honest, is most of us.
The Post-Rehearsal Debrief, Where Things Got Slightly Feral
We ended up sat outside the minicab office afterward, all four of us, sharing two litres of water and one bag of ice from the corner shop, discussing with genuine seriousness whether our bassist’s plan to sleep in his own bathtub tonight represented reasonable heatwave adaptation or a genuine cry for help. I don’t think we reached a conclusion. I think we simply accepted, collectively, that this is where the summer has brought us, four adults debating bathtub sleeping arrangements outside a defunct minicab office at eleven at night because it was, genuinely, the coolest available surface any of us could think of.
What This Week Has Actually Taught Me About the Band
There’s something worth noting in how a band handles genuine adversity, even something as unglamorous as a brutal heatwave with no air conditioning, and I think we’ve handled it well, all things considered. Nobody’s quit. Nobody’s had a proper meltdown, aside from the sofa-adjacent metaphorical kind. We’ve kept showing up, kept playing through it, kept finding the specific gallows humour that gets a London punk band through August without a working fan or a functioning sense of personal dignity.
Where I’m At Right Now, Writing This
I’m writing this diary entry directly from my own bed, fan pointed at my face, seriously considering whether tonight is the night I, too, achieve genuine sofa-adjacent merger with my own mattress, purely out of heat-induced surrender. If you don’t hear from me next week, assume the furniture won.
A Genuinely Serious Point Buried Under All This
Underneath the jokes about sofas and bathtubs, there’s something worth actually naming about this run of heatwaves, the sheer number of London flats and rehearsal spaces, mine included, that were never built with any of this in mind, single-glazed windows, no proper ventilation, landlords who treat “it gets a bit warm in summer” as a complete and sufficient answer to a genuine, recurring concern. The Daily Mash piece works precisely because it exaggerates a real, shared frustration into something absurd enough to laugh at, rather than inventing a problem from nothing.
I don’t have a tidy solution to offer here, beyond the fan currently pointed directly at my face and a growing, entirely justified resentment toward whoever designed this building’s windows to seal shut. What I do have is a band that’s kept turning up, kept playing, kept finding the joke in it rather than simply collapsing under the heat, which feels, on reflection, like exactly the right way to get through a summer as genuinely miserable as this one has turned out to be. Further London punk diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with the original sofa piece available at thedailymash.co.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/
