Drink tea when the weather is hot and eat ice cream when it’s cold or raining

Yesterday I bought an ice cream in the pouring rain in Borehamwood, on the edge of London.

I thought the grocery shop owner might have been grateful. Instead, he laughed.

Fair enough.

But my parents told me, if it is very hot, you should drink a cup of hot tea. That will make you feel hot inside your body and there will be less of a temperature difference between the inside and outside, so you will feel cooler.

By the same token, if it is cold outside and you eat ice cream, you will be colder inside your body and, by lessening the comparative difference between inside and outside, you will feel less cold.

My father was stationed in the island of Malta in the Mediterranean during World War 2 – he was in the British Navy – and the Maltese, he said, drank hot tea during heatwaves.

You sweat initially but, once the inside of your body warms up, you feel the heat outside your body less.

When I was a schoolboy growing up in Aberdeen, in the NE of Scotland, I once made a shop owner very happy by buying an ice cream during a snow storm. He said it was his only sale of the morning.

My friend Lynn has just faced death from a falling iguana in Costa Rica

Last week, I was watching the BBC News Channel, like I do.

The BBC weatherman came up on screen, as he does.

He started talking about the unusually low temperatures in Florida and how the National Weather Service there had issued a warning about the dangers to the public from iguanas falling out of the trees.

Specifically, the National Weather Service in Miami warned residents:

“Don’t be surprised if you see iguanas falling from the trees tonight as lows drop into the 30s and 40s.” 

When temperatures drop, apparently iguanas tend to become immobile.

As a result, they lose their grip and fall out of the trees, remaining stunned on the ground until they thaw out.

Male iguanas can be up to five feet long and weigh 20 pounds. You do not want your loved ones to be hit by a falling iguana and there are a lot of them about: female iguanas can lay around 80 eggs per year.

The Associated Press reported that the number of iguanas in South Florida has “increased dramatically in recent years,” so death by iguana is an increasing danger.

The BBC News weatherman last week had done additional research. He said that apparently, in these low temperatures, iguanas have trouble mating. He said (and you have to say it out loud) that this was known as a reptile dysfunction.

This is why I pay my TV Licence in the UK: to be simultaneously and succinctly informed, educated and entertained.

Today, a week later, I received an email from my friend Lynn (not to be confused with comic performer Lynn Ruth Miller), currently in Costa Rica. It reads: 

“Waiting for rain to stop. We had a massive iguana thud from a tree onto a table where we were eating.”

So the danger continues, increases and may spread further.

You have been warned.

This is very reminiscent of a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 movie Magnolia…