This week’s story, “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub,” opens as two old friends, Tracey and Lois, meet for coffee in London on a hot May day. (“The air was already at blood heat outside,” you write.) They’re discussing Tracey’s new cooker and how much she dislikes using an electric stovetop. Did you always know that a conversation about stovetops would be the way into the story?

Absolutely not! I knew what I wanted to write about, but I had to wait for that surprise cooker nugget before I could get going. Climate change is such awkward, intractable subject matter. Statistics or moralizing or showing a polar bear in trouble won’t do, and the usual dystopian story is way too comfortable, as it dodges the present moment. Here, I had the ideal cover: two older women chatting about their cookers.

The story is as much about mortality as it is about stoves. Tracey, worried about her recently retired husband’s heart, is going to a CPR workshop, and Lois is on her way to visit her elderly mother. They’ve reached a time in life when the future is almost certainly going to be shorter than the past. How much does Tracey think about this?

“Every third thought” was what Prospero said when he retired! Tracey is clearly a seventeenth-century sort of girl, when they wrote particularly beautifully about mortality, as can be seen from the quotations that swim into her mind during the story. But Tracey has probably always thought about this. She knows things wear out eventually, including our bodies. She knows we live in time. And as for the future looking shorter than the past? That description equally well applies to our probable timeline on this planet, the way things are progressing.

CPR, it turns out, has a low rate of success. Do you think the workshop teacher ever despairs of the possible futility of her classes?

Probably not. It’s never a bad thing to share the facts, and knowing about the low odds for successful resuscitation may mean less self-recriminating grief in future days for those who happen to be present at such a scene. Surely anybody would want to know they did what they could to help in such an emergency? During the pandemic, an American friend told me that COVID was known by the young ones in her circle as the “Boomer Remover”—a title which might actually prove more accurate for the world’s new silent assassin, extreme heat. We are in for a big increase in summer heart attacks, as many of these are brought on by preëxisting health conditions reacting to the shift in temperature. The CPR classes could even prove to be a profitable growth area for Weary.

Later that day, Tracey joins a real-estate agent, Ollie, to look at a flat. She and her husband are thinking about moving into a smaller space. “Downsize and Die,” Ollie says they call it in the office, before catching himself. For Tracey, this is a line to share with Lois. Would aging be a lot grimmer without an old friend like this?

Oh, but surely friends are the flower of life all the way through! Having two or three people on the same wavelength is the ultimate luxury, whether you’re twenty-three or forty-six or ninety-two. Though you’re right—old friends become rarer as the big scythe starts to swish more frequently. And, while you can make new friends, by definition it’s impossible to make new old friends—so you lose your shared past as well.

The unusual thing about Tracey and Lois is that, as well as communicating via WhatsApp, they’ve actually managed to meet IRL and exchange an IRL hug.

In “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub,” it’s still only May, but London is roasting. The story reflects this year’s spring in London—and much of the U.K. has experienced heat wave after heat wave this summer. How much does the weather unsettle Tracey?

The British Isles are famed for their cloud cover and drizzle, so we had somehow assumed the weather gods would stop at the Channel. We were wrong. Hardly anybody has air-con, or knows how to deal with the prolonged heat now that it’s here, and London feels like the hottest place in the country. Nurses are fainting on the wards, children are flopping onto their desks at school. It’s been the scariest summer of Tracey’s life.

In 2009, we published your story “Diary of an Interesting Year,” which is set in the Britain of 2040, some time after, we’re told, “the Big Melt.” There’s food rationing, enforced car-sharing (until fuel is cancelled for civilian use), no internet, and it’s raining most of the time. It’s a dark, but often very funny, story about the aftermath of climate catastrophe. Seventeen years on, do you think about that story much? Does the vision of 2040 hold up?

Yes to both questions, unfortunately. I’d done a lot of climate-science reading and found it hard and depressing, but that was the only way then to be able to write with any convincing power toward “In-Flight Entertainment,” my 2010 story collection. With different stories I tried different ways into the subject: sales pitch, various love conflicts, death-on-a-plane in first class—and this dystopian black comedy. I set the story thirty years ahead, a time gap easy enough for the imagination to leap via younger friends or children or grandchildren: think of them at whatever age they’ll be in thirty years’ time.

Yes, that was seventeen years ago, which leaves only fourteen years to the Big Melt of 2040. In Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” it’s 2042 when the Great Inundation floods the U.K.; I can’t have been too far off the mark. It’s not that improbable, 2040, even though it’s now so uncomfortably close. Yikes. ♦