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Too hot to be British: the heatwave continues to grip London. The Met Office has highlighted that June 2026 set new national records and that a huge number of weather stations recorded the hottest June in their history.
Residents report in particular that they cannot bear the tropical nights, as they have been dubbed: 20°C outside, up to 28°C in the bedrooms – practically the mouth of hell. Homes feel like veritable ovens.
In a desperate attempt to escape the heat, many Londoners have found themselves involved in curious incidents – fortunately without serious consequences.
Anthony slowly opens his eyes, in despair: his short-sighted gaze drifts blankly for a few moments towards the ceiling, streaked with blue light from flickering neon signs across the street. He opens his mouth wide in an attempt to catch a breath of fresh air, to no avail: his tongue is hit by a wave of heat and stings uncomfortably. He gropes around with his arm, finds his iPhone and grasps it limply, raising it to eye level – without his glasses, he has to hold it barely a span from his nose: it’s 02:47. Not even an hour has passed since he last looked at his phone.
Anthony rubs his forehead, drenched in sweat and exasperated: it’s 27°C in the room and even thinking is a struggle. He huffs. Beside him, Asa moans beneath the wet towel he’d thrown over himself two hours earlier, now dried out. Having finally drifted into a light sleep punctuated by nightmares – in which he was trying to free himself from being buried alive in the dunes of the Sahara – the man snores softly, a warm, gentle sound like the reassuring rumble of a well-run-in engine. Anthony smiles slightly as he pauses to listen to his husband’s breathing, relieved that he’s finding some respite. He’d like to get up, go to the window and shout his frustration at the stars, but he’s afraid of disturbing Asa. So, he stays lying on the damp mattress, making a mental note to contact his solicitor the following morning – that is, in a few hours’ time – to see if it’s possible to file a complaint against whoever had the bloody idea of designing London’s houses to trap heat.
Then he realises there might actually be too many heads to roll and grunts in exasperation. He’ll have to file a complaint against persons unknown for excessive heat and disturbance – not just that! Devastation! – of public rest. Perhaps he’ll add vandalism to the list too.
In search of a distraction, the redhead lazily stares at his smartphone, scrolling through one reel after another.
Amidst videos of pandas falling spectacularly from trees and far-fetched challenges of people tucking bags of frozen peas under their armpits, Anthony is about to put his phone down and resign himself to counting ducks to fall asleep.
Just before turning off the screen, however, a video catches his attention.
Anthony raises his hand again and focuses on what he’s watching, suddenly wide awake. On the screen, a live stream from Lapland: a girl with glasses and long black hair is smiling at her audience, whilst the sun behind her hovers just above the horizon, an orange disc setting the landscape ablaze. He reads the hashtags: #midnightsun, #sunsetrise, #goldenhourforever. A sticker flashes mockingly, telling everyone that in Narvik, at 03:51 on a day in late June, it’s 10°C.
Anthony loses himself staring at the live stream, watching the sun’s path as it dances horizontally along the horizon, never setting nor rising. It is now dawn when the cries of foxes in the neighbour’s garden rouse him from his trance. The phone slips from his hand and, thanks to an accidental swipe, the live stream vanishes into the depths of the algorithm. Asa mumbles, annoyed but still too tightly in Morpheus’s embrace to wake up.
Anthony, for his part, is far too wide awake to get back to sleep. The two of them had been planning to retreat for a few days to their cottage in the South Downs – their retirement plan, as well as the destination for almost all their city breaks. However, although the National Park is a few degrees cooler than the city, for Anthony it’s simply not enough. Not now that he’s spent hours watching a live stream of a complete stranger sitting by a lake, capturing the midnight sun.
Anthony thought he knew what a sunset looked like.
Sunsets viewed from the South Downs are of a poetic and poignant beauty; the countryside slowly turns shades of gold, orange and purple before fading into darkness, in a marvellous metaphor for endings that herald new beginnings.
But this, on the other hand…
…this was a sunset with the feel of a dawn.
And vice versa.
Anything was possible under that marvellous golden light so much lauded by photographers and videographers. That light which, at his latitude, blesses the landscape for little more than half an hour, whilst further north it continued undeterred to reveal itself to curious observers for hours on end.
Hours.
Not to mention the chill. Ten degrees Celsius. Ten bloody degrees Celsius. It’s outrageous! Anthony takes it as a personal affront: how dare they be out in the cool there, whilst in London a slow, agonising heatwave is taking its toll? Every year, temperatures reach exceptional heights, breaking the records already set the previous year. Anthony is increasingly under the impression that his ‘exceptional’ and the media’s ‘exceptional’ are not the same ‘exceptional’.
The sun, rising relentlessly until the alarm sounds, finds him like this, lost in daydreams – which, in his case, look dangerously like devising, planning and working out plans B, C and D. Whilst Asa slowly sits up and somehow manages to crawl out of bed, towards a day that already seems endless, Anthony allows himself a little more time amongst the damp sheets, a plan already roughly sketched out in his mind.
“I don’t think I’ve quite understood.”
“Excellent. There isn’t much to understand, believe me. It’s a matter of trust. Do you trust me?”
Asa trusts his husband blindly. He’s trusted him from the very first moment he saw him set foot in the shop. He trusted him when he suggested they go to a dark, secluded spot to gaze at the stars – and that was the first of an endless series of evenings devoted to stargazing. He trusted him when he took him to view a cottage in a national park.
Why shouldn’t he trust him now, when he’s suggesting a romantic getaway – and to a cold place, it seems!
“Of course, darling,” Asa replies with a sweet smile.
Anthony is delighted, and not just because of the smile – although that alone would be more than enough. “Marvellous! Get ready, we’re leaving from St Pancras at 6 pm. Bring a waterproof jacket.”
“But… today? And how long will we be away?”
“How long can you stay away from your books?” Anthony asks in return, with a mischievous smile.
“It depends on what we get up to in the meantime…” replies Asa, just as mischievously.
“Oooh…” Anthony closes his eyes with a smug look. “I’d love to give you a taste of what’s in store, but we’re already running out of time.” Anthony leans down to kiss his husband, his hand clenched around the mug crammed with six shots of espresso. “Take a thick jumper. A beanie. Woolly socks. Gloves. And… mmmhhh… if we need anything else, we’ll buy it along the way.”
“Professor Anthony Jay Crowley. Should I be worried?”
“Nah. Trust me.”
Brussels welcomes them with yet another gust of warm air, which, however, carries with it an enticing promise of friteries. Anthony is still revelling in the thrill of having travelled beneath the English Channel – with a full eighty metres of water above their heads! – whilst Asa is trying to put it out of his mind. The blond lad has brought several layers of warm clothing with him and, upon reading the destination on the display board, had tried to hide his disappointment: he’d really been hoping to end up somewhere cooler. On reflection, he realised he really had no idea what Anthony was up to – and the ticket he’d given him wasn’t helping at all, given that it was an Interrail Global Pass.
“Our hotel’s ten minutes from here. Let’s drop off our things and then I’ll take you straight out for a bite to eat. They take chips very seriously here, you know?”
“Don’t we have time to freshen up a bit? Unpack our bags?”
“...we don’t need to unpack them,” replies Anthony, with a mischievous smile.
“...no?”
“No. We’re setting off again first thing tomorrow morning.”
Asa doesn’t reply: he lowers his eyes and smiles. Then he takes Anthony’s hand and lets himself be led. All around them, trams clatter by, people drink beer, eat the ever-present chips, laugh and relax. It’s a warm evening, but the two of them are already feeling much better than they did twenty-four hours earlier.
Another twenty-four hours have passed and Asa and Anthony are strolling hand in hand along the Binnenalster, in the heart of Hamburg. Having set off from Brussels that morning, they’d stopped off in Cologne: Anthony’d included this stop only because, right next to the station, stands the Cathedral, and he couldn’t resist the temptation to see, for the umpteenth time, Asa’s reverent expression at the heights that art can reach when it serves religion.
The fresh air feels like a gentle caress, accompanying them on their stroll along the lakeside. The couple hold hands, lazily eating an ice cream and watching the swans. The twinkling lights are already visible, as the light shifts towards its cooler hues. Asa squeezes his husband's hand tighter.
“We really needed this getaway.”
“Yeah.”
After a moment’s silence, Anthony speaks again: “Just think, tomorrow we’ll be heading even further north.”
Asa turns to look at him and nearly drops her ice cream: “Are you telling me this wasn’t here where you wanted to take me?!”
Anthony turns his gaze towards the sunset and smiles without replying.
The next morning they set off from Hamburg after their first peaceful night’s sleep in days. In Copenhagen, they just have time to buy something for lunch – coffee, hot dogs and Kanelsnegl – before rushing to the platform. Asa is struck by the number of people simply lounging in the patches of sunlight on the pavements, and Anthony explains that this is very common in the Nordic countries, as they really do miss the sun so much.
The train arrives at the Øresund Bridge without the slightest warning, and the sea takes the place of the mainland. Anthony catches his husband’s attention with a light tap on the hand. Asa, sitting by the window, looks up from the book he is reading, and Anthony nods towards the view. The blue stretching as far as the eye can see takes him by surprise. Eight kilometres of bridge, twenty minutes literally over the water. Asa absent-mindedly slips the bookmark between the first pages of A Gentleman in Moscow and loses himself in the landscape.
It is evening when they arrive in Stockholm. Yet it doesn’t really feel like evening: the light is still bright and diffused. Wherever they look, they see water: bridges, boats, islands. The two of them stroll through the narrow streets of Gamla Stan, the old town, their eyes lingering on the smooth cobblestones and the little yellow and red houses, before heading down towards Skeppsbron. They order food completely at random, laughing as they try to guess how to pronounce the names of the dishes. They feel very brave dipping meatballs into lingonberry jam, and Asa proclaims that she has just developed a fetish for rye bread.
“So… have we arrived? Was this where you wanted to take me?”
Anthony smiles enigmatically and avoids his husband’s probing gaze: “…not yet, no.”
Asa laughs: “Are we going to stop at some point?”
“Yes. Tomorrow.”
Asa sets down his fork on his plate, with a bite of salmon still impaled on the prongs: carrying on without knowing where they were going had been strange and somewhat unnerving, though not unpleasant. After seventy-two hours, he was getting used to it, and in some tiny corner of his mind, the idea of reaching their destination was slowly tugging at him.
“I promise,” Anthony continued, before adding, “And you’ll see it’ll be worth it.”
“I know,” replies Asa, intertwining her fingers with his husband’s.
About sixteen hours’ train journey: Anthony pretends to be interested in the screen of his MacBook Air, whilst Asa has started reading A Gentleman in Moscow from the beginning again. On the road running parallel to the railway line, commuter traffic is quite heavy – at least by Danish standards. Advertising hoardings and road signs full of illegible names follow one after another at regular intervals. The little yellow and red houses stand out against the backdrop, cheerful and still.
As the hours pass, the road signs disappear, as do the houses. The cultivated fields slowly give way to woods and cars become increasingly rare. Every now and then Anthony gives Asa a nudge with his elbow, gesturing for him to look out of the window: the mountains quietly come into view. Mountains and water. Woods. Then lakes, more and more lakes, even more lakes. Anthony smiles. Every now and then, Asa shoots him a questioning glance and Anthony shakes his head or winks.
The rhythmic clatter of the train’s wheels on the tracks, the hum of Anthony’s laptop and the rustle of the pages Asa turns become the only sounds as the train empties. Asa reads increasingly improbable names on the screen not far away and has no idea where they’re actually going. A word pops into his mind as the vegetation outside the window grows shorter and sparser: tundra. He’d studied it at school, literally ages ago, and that word had tucked itself away in a little corner of his brain, alongside quadratic equations and Charlemagne’s date of birth. A wild suspicion begins to flit through his mind. He turns to Anthony with the look of someone who has just discovered a crucial clue and is on the verge of unmasking the murderer. Anthony smiles slyly and nods. His husband shakes his head and laughs softly, returning to read the same page for the umpteenth time.
Meanwhile, the light simply stops changing. The silhouettes of the birch trees still stand out sharply outside the window, even as the clock hands continue to tick. Asa looks out more and more often, his mind captivated by the unchanging landscape. She almost jumps when two reindeer peek out from between the tree trunks, chewing quietly. Anthony smiles tenderly, his MacBook’s battery having run out hours ago: his husband’s reactions are the only thing worth studying.
It is past midnight when the two of them finally alight at Abisko, in the heart of Lapland. The station is tiny behind them. Ahead lie shrubs, low birch trees and an arc of mountains closing off the valley.
Now that the train has set off again, silence takes centre stage. You can’t hear a thing, yet it’s a silence that fills your ears. The air is fresh, crisp and carries a faint sweet, minty scent that would seem almost out of place anywhere else. Here, however, it makes perfect sense.
“Don’t you have anything to ask me?”
Asa turns to his husband, his eyes full of wonder: “Is this the place? You wanted to bring me here?”
Anthony smiles smugly: “Exactly. Welcome to Lapland! We’re in the Arctic Circle! Now that’s properly chilly, don’t you think?”
The blond man looks around, taken aback. If he’d told him about it straight out, he would have thought he was mad.
Instead, four days’ journey and six trains later, they’ve arrived… in Lapland, had Anthony said? Asa doesn’t even know exactly where they are. His husband doesn’t give him time to feel disoriented: he takes him by the hand and the two set off.
Asa notices every detail quite naturally, and it’s only after walking for a few minutes that he realises he can do so because there’s still enough light to see properly.
He stops and holds on to his husband’s hand: “It’s still light.”
“Yes.”
Asa glances at the vintage Longines on his wrist and checks the time. 00:37. He looks around again, then seeks out his husband’s eyes.
“You haven’t gone mad – quite the opposite. I’ll explain everything in a moment. Just give us time to get to our cabin, freshen up and perhaps make a nice cup of tea.”
The couple are sitting on the veranda of their cabin, overlooking Lake Torneträsk. It almost feels like being by the sea. The water is a thin, endless mirror, reflecting a honey-coloured sun bathed in peach-coloured streaks. A sunset that never seems to end. Wafts of steam rise from the cups that the couple, finally wrapped up in their thick jumpers, are clutching. All around them, there is nothing but peace, silence and mountains still clearly visible in the background.
Anthony looks at his iPhone screen: it’s almost three in the morning, which is two in London. Ninety-five hours earlier, he’d been watching this spectacle on his screen, and now he was there, together with Asa.
“So you’re telling me the sun never sets?”
“It’s not that it never sets… let’s just say it’s as if it’s been trying to set for six months straight.”
Asa whistles softly: “Still… a six-month sunset is a long time.”
“What’s six months compared to six thousand years?” replies Anthony, raising his mug to his lips, whilst his eyes follow the reflection of a leaf falling slowly onto the surface of the lake.
Asa remains silent for a moment, lost in thought: “Did you say… six thousand years?”
Anthony furrows his brow slightly: “Yes…”
“Why?”
“It just popped into my head.”
“Strange…”
“Yes. Well, I don’t know why I said it.”
The sun hovers on the horizon, whilst the birds sing and the leaves rustle softly. The two continue to sip their tea, a warm and comforting embrace against the nipping air.
“I’m heading back. Are you coming with me?”
“Of course.”