How to stay cool in this heatwave

As the heatwave continues across Europe, with temperatures forecast over 40degC for some parts of the Camino Frances, here's Laurie Lee heaping up the crushed ice in one of my favourite passages. I hope it helps us all to keep cool:

"By now it was noon, with almost everyone under cover, in the bars and moistly shaded cafes, at this hour when Madrid properly came into its own- a dewdrop on the grid-iron plain.....For Madrid at that time, if not today, was a city of a thousand exquisite taverns- water-cooled, barrel lined and cavernously spacious......Stepping in from the torrid street, you met a band of cool air like fruit peel pressed to your brow, and entered a cloistered grotto laden with the tang of shellfish, wet tiles and winesoaked wood. Nobody drank without eating- it would have been thought uncivilized......while the surge of conversation continued like bubbling water under the framed pictures of bulls and heroes. It was a way of life evolved like a honeycomb and buried away from the burning sky; and perhaps no other city at that time had so succesfully come to terms with this particular priority of pleasure."

I'm amazed at his capacity to evoke a sense of place and time with a few well chosen words. There's a collection of Cider with Rosie and other editions in the bar of his local pub, The Woolpack, which probably hasn't changed a great deal since he lived in Slad.