A hint, a subtle sense of summer: in many places it is very hot this summer, but not here. Here it has mostly been cool, actually cold and rainy – I joked as we left Alfred's apartment that the southern Europeans would all move here if climate change made the Mediterranean a sauna – or, more probably, rich Swiss bankers would buy up all the houses for themselves to move here from the Alps, and we'd be standing in the North Sea.
When we went to eat in an Italian restaurant in North Shields, a gentle subcontinental maitre d' stopped when he saw
me, said he hadn't seen me in a long time, and was I well. I answered as best I could – I'm not sure we could have met at all (have I ever been in that restaurant?), but the attention was welcome. We touched arms when I left, with slightly surprising and comfortable intimacy...
Seasons came in again, when Charles started a renga on Facebook, and I tried to follow... you're supposed to maintain the seasonal references; when he interpolated a summer/autumn line I didn't manage to keep it quite in focus, but did work out two lines on climate change, which sort of counts. For our degenerate (?) era, anyway.
But tonight the windows are open, because the temperature isn't dropping: it stays pleasant, a sense in the air that one would want to be here, now.
Seasons, time, encounters, pleasures of moments: hints – or a particular hint? – in late August....
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