The Big Read: In my little corner of hell

By two o'clock on Sunday afternoon, even the mad dogs and Englishmen had given up: the dogs were asleep, splatted on the floor like beanbags that had slid off the back of a kindergarten-supply truck, and the Englishmen were slumped over air-conditioning units, caressing the vents with an exhausted, post-coital sweatiness.

Some of the more pragmatic ones had realised that the bitters would not last the day, and were re-arranging the fridge poetry to read, "I am just going outside and may be some time." Otherwise, nothing moved.

How hot was Cape Town at that moment? It was hard to tell. The decorative thermometer in the neighbour's bird house had caught fire hours ago, ignited by a burning starling cartwheeling past. I tried to ask the internet but my bandwidth had melted in the pipe and was dripping out of the router onto the floor, slowly forming a large steaming puddle in which bobbed Facebook baby pictures and videos of cats slipping off countertops.

When I was very young and first discovered the existence of volcanoes, I worried that Devil's Peak was a ticking geological time bomb. My all-in-pictures encyclopaedia, the pages on Pompei well-thumbed, confirmed that it fitted the profile all too well: it was a mountain, it was more or less conical, and I lived under it. I would look up at the brooding peak and imagine archaeologists making a plaster mould of my little shape, curled protectively around a corgi, which in turn was curled protectively around a piece of Lego that it had carried away to chew at its leisure. Someone would draw an illustration of the scene for a new children's encyclopaedia, with the caption "Daily life in ancient Kenilworth": I grieved for my future, calcified self, and for the reputation of my dog, damned for all time as a thieving vandal.

These days I am fairly sure that Devil's Peak is not a volcano, but right now the heat coming off it was just as brutal. I am ambivalent about Table Mountain at the best of times - I'm not convinced that its mild beauty quite makes up for the amount of quasi-esoteric bollocks it generates - but today I loathed it. It is a hateful thing in the heat, blocking whatever breeze there is, cupping the sun in its shimmering crags, turning the air into hot breath that makes the city glow like a coal.

I was glaring at its grey wall, as picturesque as a heap of compacted ash, when my flat's intercom buzzed. Was it the army? Was I being evacuated to the beaches, to be taken by landing-craft out to a refrigerated United Nations container ship? Perhaps not. The beaches would be chaos right now, choked with the lissome people who flock there whenever it gets unpleasantly hot, to give Cape Town its reputation as a glamorous destination and to ensure comfortable retirements for dermatologists.

"Hello m'larney!" shouted the intercom. Ah, my old friend the fishmonger, a man whose optimism is matched only by his inability to hear the word "no": in the seven years he has buzzed my intercom I have never bought so much as a single krill off him; and yet he perseveres. "Lekker fresh prawns!" he cried.

Given that he operates out of an open bakkie, such an invitation is usually tinged with adventure. Today it was a threat. I was about to suggest to him that he change his sales pitch to "Lekker tiny pink ampoules of weapons-grade food poisoning, delivered to your door by Typhoid Mary", but then I heard a faint cry and soft whump. He had spontaneously combusted. Peace returned.

Dusk came like cinders drifting down from a forest fire. The city dimmed, an oven with a busted light. But evening brought some relief, just enough for my bandwidth to congeal and reveal to me that for most of the afternoon it had been 38 degrees in my corner of hell. Now, I know that this isn't much by global standards. I know that when it's 38 degrees in Australia, mothers don't let their children go sledding without a scarf and gloves. But I'm not Australian. I am Capetonian, an alien hybrid grafted onto a fragile ecological niche, adapted to survive in a temperature band between 19.2 and 19.4 degrees centigrade.

Perhaps, with a few small innovations, I might manage something in the high-20s, as long as those small innovations involved me being in a chest freezer in Greenland. But it's snowing in the American Deep South and Britain is a lake.

Climate change has arrived, and if Sunday was a sign of things to come then I fear that I am as doomed as a credulous seafood fan sucking down a prawn off the back of a bakkie.