Either end of a warm day, the world
How I love these summer evenings in England. To exit a pub and find oneself in a small town in the Dales, and wander, happily alone amongst the amiable promenaders, in the warm comforting air down to the river where the the sky darkens to that peculiar intense blue of the late evening, and the streetlights just begin their empire, but where the air keeps on the blanketing side of heat. Is there anything better, anything more like heaven?1
And yet, these summer days also remind me of waking in the tropics; the air cool, but starting to heat, and that singular sweet tropical effluvia of slowly warming flotsam and fruit; walking in the quiet morning down the Chao Phraya or Bagmati, along the Straits of Johor, or the Kowloon waterfront; the strays asleep on the edge of the road, and all the bustle yet to stir. A world away, yet a world so close.2
8 June 2023
Notes:
1 In general, as a hayfever sufferer, I'm no fan of the heat; and I suspect we'll all come to wish the world was cooler – probably sooner rather than later. Nevertheless, it is hard not to love a warm evening by a Yorkshire river, pint in belly, watching the grayling sup unlucky insects from the water's top.
2 There's something about water that saves a city, however badly we treat it. Being a child of the country, as much as I love its layers of culture and history, I'm no great fan of London. Nevertheless, in the year or so I lived in Surrey working at a government research station, I regularly used to go up to the museums and galleries, and so I know there's no better way to visit than very early on a warming Saturday morning, the city still abed, the sun burning off the river mist, and walk from Waterloo over the Thames, along the North Bank, and up to Bloomsbury to grab a coffee and pastry from some early morning bakery and await opening hours with a broadsheet in one of the many small parks. It really is a different and rather lovely city, and the ten minutes company with the soft early morning Thames is what transforms both you and it.