A pocket of moving air
The bench at the end of the garden gets the four o'clock sun, and in this stretch of summer that is both its charm and its problem. I sit there to shell beans or read three pages of a book I have been reading for a month, and by half past the hour I am fanning myself with the book instead. English houses are built to hold heat like a grudge. Nobody warns you about that when you move here. They warn you about the rain, and then the one hot fortnight arrives and the whole country lies awake together.
Nấm has had her little fan since last summer, the one with the bear ears, and she guards it the way dragons guard gold. This year I stopped negotiating with a four-year-old and got my own, a grown-up grey one, the SABRENT ChillyPop. It is the size of a large spoon, charges from the same cable as my phone, and has a small metal clip on the end so it hangs off my bag when we go out. On the bench it sits propped against the tea mug, pointed at me, and the four o'clock sun and I have reached a new understanding.
Then there is the bedroom, which is where it earned its keep for good. On the hot nights I set it on the low speed on the bedside table, and the low speed is quiet, a small steady breath of a sound that has replaced the great flapping of the folded newspaper as this household's official cooling system. Thành, who claims not to feel heat, fell asleep first. I lay in the moving air and forgave the house its grudge.
It runs a good long evening on a charge, the box says up to eight hours, and that is the low speed talking; run it on high and it is more like a couple of hours, which is the arithmetic of every small battery ever made. The three speeds are honestly different from each other. Most of the sixty-odd reviews call it quiet and mean it, though one person found theirs loud, and I suspect they lived on the top speed, which does have a voice.
Worth knowing. The head does not tilt or swivel. You point the whole fan, propped or clipped or held. It has never once bothered me on a bench, and it might bother you at a desk.
We are past the halfway mark of the hot fortnight now, by my reckoning. The fan will spend August in my bag, then the winter in a drawer, and next June I will find it again like money in a coat pocket. Some purchases are for keeps. Some are for a season that comes back every year, which amounts to the same thing.
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