Australia has long had its freakishly hot days, but this summer feels different

One minute we are all in court watching interminable CCTV footage of me in a car getting pulled over by police on Bondi Road, and the next minute we are all sitting in darkness. The power is out. The courtroom has gone black.

‘The run of hot days in a row are longer, and hotter.
The minimum temperatures are rising, and it doesn’t
cool down dramatically at night. Records are tumbling
 all over the place’

It’s a brown-out – caused by stress on the electricity grid due to the Thursday’s extreme heat in Sydney.

In the sun all the cops, defendants, solicitors and a TV crew stand under a paltry few trees. The temperature is around 40 degrees and the air feels viscous and substantial. Our case is eventually moved into the main courtroom in the city.

There would be millions of these tiny vignettes being told all over Australia this summer, small stories of the things that happen to us (and happen to our infrastructure and our environment) in the heat. They are stories about the way things break down, or are interrupted or are made difficult because of the heat.

But these vignettes all add up to something, a sort of mosaic that shows us what it is like to live in this country at this moment.

Read the story from The Guardian by Brigid Delaney - “Australia has long had its freakishly hot days, but this summer feels different.”