From the Straight of Hormuz, to the back seat of an Uber-ride in Jo'burg - a story about the geo-politics of energy, and the daily grind of extreme heat.

Finding freedom through meaning-making and action in the existential overwhelm of an ever-hotter world: what 33C does to a birthday brain.

Creativity oxygenates the human soul. If we stopped creating, we might as well stop breathing. It’d be psychological suffocation.

There are cat people. There are dog people. There are people who don’t care much for either, which is fair enough.

There’s another kind, too. The kind us wit ouens don’t like to admit is ‘a thing’ — none of us rooted for the Nats back in the ’80s, right?— but it’s there: some of us clearly like pets more than people.

Our restaurant seating is a remake of the last supper: 12 or so of us stretched along a narrow table, leaning over each other to catch the eye of someone further along. It doesn’t have the same sense of foreboding, although it should.

This story starts with a gift. It ends with a murder.

What does this weekend’s anti-inequality protest in the Tower of London have to do with the environmental lawyer whose keynote address opened the World Conference of Science Journalists far away in South Africa?

Everything. The clue is right there in the name.

I tell the bloke in the coffee shop that I'm traveling around the country, reporting on the climate crisis. His demeanour flips to the icier side of chilly.

‘Rubbish, all nonsense,’ he says.

There’ve only been three times in the past year where I’ve thought I might have to throw in the towel on the Story Ark voyage.

Each time, because of fear.

Fear, brought on by heat.

If Story Ark’s departure day had been written as a screen play, it could have been penned by Dante himself. There were no dock-side ticker-tape parades. Story Ark set sail eight months ago, on 6 October 2024, and it was a shocker of a day. There were no streamers, no bottles of bubbly exploding extravagantly over the hull as we hoisted anchor mid-morning on that Sunday, and sailed away from the safe harbour after nearly three decades of living the high-life in Cape Town, South Africa.

No one sets out to get into trouble. It’s usually a cascade of small events that take you from ‘fine’ to ‘not at all fine’ before you’ve had a chance to think things through.

Which is how I find myself I’m standing here, pleading for help, and hopelessly ill-equipped for a desert outing.