Shutting the Windows to Keep the House Cool

Notes from the Group Conversation Class

Yesterday I shut all the windows to keep the house cool!

That sounds backwards, I know.

But the wind coming up from the south was so hot it was like standing in front of a hair dryer, and the only way to hold on to the cool air inside was to close everything up and wait it out. It was thirty degrees before the morning had properly started.

Ceiling fan on, one air con unit to the side, a second on the floor, and I still nearly cried with the heat of it.

That is the daily reality now, here in Italy.

There is a city about forty-five minutes from me that turns its water off completely between nine and five. Not for some houses, all of them: homes, shops, the coffee bars that now keep big tanks and fill them overnight. They have done it for years, because the water table has dropped and dropped and it simply isn’t sustainable any more.

So when the topic of “preparing for changing living conditions” came up in this week’s conversation class, we had rather a lot to say. We ended up with a whole bank of feelings vocabulary, a handful of advanced words for weather that keeps escalating, a proper look at that maddening cluster of letters in drought, and a grammar structure that quietly makes you sound far more sophisticated than you did ten minutes earlier.

It turned into one of those lessons I wanted to write up properly. So I did.

Paid members not only get the conversation session…

…but they get the class notes!

See below: the complete emotion vocabulary bank in positive and negative pairs, the four “weather that won’t quit” words with clear definitions, the OUGH pronunciation trap laid bare, and this month’s Grammar in Focus on cleft sentences, together with the lesson slides and the practice worksheet to download.