One for the Heatwave...

'The heat has come down handsomely upon Lahore: the temperature, even in a room fanned by a punkah, is 95°F and an ill omened pillar of dust is skirmishing outside under an orange coloured sky. The clouds are so low down and so metallic in appearance that one feels as if they could be rapped with the knuckles, and if this were done they would ring like saucepans...' 
That's the teenage Rudyard Kipling writing home to his mother and sister from the scorching summer heat of Lahore (then in India, now in Pakistan). Already the assistant editor of the Civil & Military Gazette, Kipling was left holding the fort while most of his colleagues had decamped to the cool hill country for the summer. Suffering from night terrors and an entirely reasonable fear of cholera, young Rudyard found it all but impossible to sleep, so took to wandering the streets of the Old City at night. This was an unthinkable thing for a respectable white man to do, but it brought him into intimate contact with Indian street life – loud, colourful, chaotic, sometimes menacing – and furnished him with much material not only for his newspaper but for the short stories he was already writing (and, especially, Kim). Those nocturnal wanderings, like the epic night walks of Dickens through London, seem to have done much to fire his creative imagination. In the course of them the teenage Kipling also habitually availed himself of Lahore's prostitutes, and discovered the pleasures of opium and hashish – all apparently without a qualm. The heat can do strange things to a man... 
Incidentally, the drink that got the British through all that Indian heat was weak whisky and soda, the 'chota peg'. Churchill carried on drinking it through most of his life. Cheers!