Once again, the
temperature climbs into the low twenties.
The sun bears down like a red-hot poker and burns the back of my
eyes. I try to find some shade, but
there is none. The cool breeze has vanished with the morning and there seems to
be no escape, save within the stygian gloom of the dining room. The front lawn is the colour of straw, purged
of its green tinge by the relentless sun.
I have been using old washing-up water to drench it, but it doesn’t seem
to like soap suds that much and the brown grass is rapidly turning into clover,
which at least stays green.
The last time I walked
down to Haddington’s river, the Tyne, the water
level was so low you could walk across it without getting your socks wet. I try to read. ‘A Dance To The Music Of Time’
by Anthony Powell, is my current reading matter. It’s a series of twelve novels, each of
around 300 pages, so there are 3600 pages to get through. Apparently, Powell introduces no fewer than
3,000 characters, almost one per page. This means I have no idea who many of
them are when they reappear four novels later. Goodness knows how the author kept track of
them all. I started the first novel in May, which is why I haven’t had much
time for writing. I’m halfway through
the last. The tale started in 1915 and
we’re into the 1970s now. I found the books in the telephone box in
Athelstaneford, which some enterprising bibliophile has turned into a library
by installing a few shelves, probably without the knowledge of British Telecom.
The red phone box is an anachronism now, and despite several hundred visits by
me, I’ve yet to see anyone use it for its proper purpose. It might just as well
be used as a miniature library. At least
it’s not used as a urinal. The idea is that you donate a book and take one out.
I withdrew all twelve at the same time, but I’m well ahead of the game, for the
phone box is full of books that I have donated over the years, most of which
no-one else has thought to withdraw (there’s been a marked lack of interest in my
Miller’s Antiques Guide 2005 and Stanley Gibbons’ 1998 Commonwealth Stamp
Catalogue).
After ten minutes of
reading in the heat I feel my eyelids growing heavy and the arms of Morpheus beckoning.
It’s most unedifying to be asleep on deck chair in the front garden whilst the
children of the street, now on holiday, run back and forward with
water-pistols, squirting each other and screaming like banshees. I put the book
down.
I spent the morning in
Port Seton with the dog. A middle-aged
woman with grey hair tied back in a bun was seated on the grass, reading a
Kindle e-thingummyjig. “Interesting book?”
I asked. “Not really,” she replied.
“It’s weird. It’s set in Charles
II’s time but suddenly there are fairies and then some people called changelings,
for heaven’s sake, whatever they are.” “They’re alien shape-shifters,” I said,
having watched Odo in ‘Deep Space Nine’.
“I don’t know what they’d be doing in 1688,” she said sulkily, “But I’m
determined to finish the thing, even if it is weird.” I left her struggling
with the narrative and made my way back to the car. The heat seemed to be turning people in on
themselves and I wondered how long it would be before we saw blessed rain
again.
