Heatwave blamed as conversation dries up
Yaxham is gripped in the midst of an unexpected heatwave, marked by an absence of rain, confused men forgetting to wear shirts, and a mysterious number of convertible cars on the roads.
“I know about all this, we learned about Summer at school,” says young villager Luke Whittaker, “I don’t usually like the academic subjects, so its nice when stuff in lessons actually happens.”
“Honestly though, I never expected this, I had my money on a volcano popping up by Cromer.”
The heatwave has also brought its share of social problems. Novelty aside, the consistently pleasant weather leaves precious little for people to talk about.
“I’d usually be moaning about the constant rain around now,” said local resident Theresa Green, “Then my husband would get in with his usual thing about the days already getting shorter and so forth. Great banter, it was,” she added with a wan smile, “Now, we just sit through them long balmy evenings in silence, it’s awful.”
The arid landscape has proved confusing for others. Although local artist Edina Cloud harmlessly likened some parched scenes around the village to the epic vistas of east Africa, her sighting of a pride of lions at Pinn’s Corner – which turned out to be a family of exhausted foxes on a picnic table – demanded an emergency callout from Banham zoo.
“We keep telling people that safari animals don’t just show up when it gets a bit hot” said local zoologist Anna Mull, “but people seem to have forgotten this is England.”
Other citizens have pointed to the rising temperatures as mounting evidence of climate change, going so far as to invite climate-skeptic President Trump to pay his first visit to Yaxham during his UK trip.
The US secret service was quick to dismiss the idea however, amid concerns that the president would be difficult to spot in the increasingly orange landscape.