This that we call “the heatwave” has forced Parisian intellectuals into an extraordinary measure, which they are apparently not used to, because they don't always have air conditioning in the metro and they sweat like lice: the sale of alcohol in supermarkets is prohibited from six in the afternoon, and also consuming it in the street from aperitif time until breakfast. They say that alcohol promotes dehydration, and it's true.
I think it's perfect. We have to be healthy and we have to avoid death. And that's why I would applaud the measure, but I don't applaud it because I would have to put my glass down. A perfectly legal glass, because here, in the Mediterranean, we've been spending summers for years and we already know “the baguette that grows there”. I bought the wine I'm drinking in the morning, precisely so it would be at a good temperature. And I went to the specialized shop, where the owner, who knows me, already asks me if I've tasted this or that and always offers me half a glass of something very strange.
That's why the French will deprive us of a very Parisian image. Mesdames and gentlemen leaving the supermarket at three in the afternoon with a bottle of the first thing they found, for example a Cristal Rose 2002, Louis Roederer's, which is the vintage that, as it happens, was available, to go and watch the World Cup match sipping something cool from a plastic cup.
Those who can't help it, of course, should pretend that what they've just bought is tea, which is a trick that was already successfully used during Prohibition (hence Long Island Iced Tea) and also during Bernard Pivot's mythical program on French television Antenne 2, interviewing writers. When Pivot interviewed Nabokov, they pretended that what was inside the teapot was not whisky. As you all know, drinking hot tea “like the Bedouins” is very well regarded during heatwaves because it makes you sweat. I certainly don't want to sweat. I'd rather dehydrate.
