Summer

When I lived with my parents, I'd sleep with the windows open in the summer.  Try it sometime, if you never have; it's worth putting up with the moths just to hear the city at night.  

Sounds drifting in close and falling away again.  You could hear a single three AM car from half a mile away, speeding through and then off somewhere else.  The occasional voice singing, shouting, laughing, fighting.  And when there was nothing else, the voices of the trees, the wind.  I remember lying back, trying to identify each sound; creaking of the wooden fences, dripping pipe somewhere down the road, cat's pawsteps right on the very edge of hearing.  Just now and then, every so often, there'd be the call of a train passing through the tunnel at the bottom of the hill.  The two-tone sound that echoed like a welcoming ghost.  A haunting sound, but not a frightening one.  

I paid such close attention.  I tried to write down what it made me feel like.  I tried to express the joy of living in the city, of the summer heat and the friendly dark and the songs of trains and cats.  Thing is, I also had a black and white TV set and a pair of headphones.  Literary ambitions had no chance because Grip of the Strangler was on again.  And so the world lost a South Yorkshire Ray Bradbury, which is probably a very good thing.

Last time I promised "actual TV stuff" without first thinking through what that would mean.  I'll level with you, I'm a bit short on ideas here.  It's nearly summer now and, just like back then, I don't feel like watching TV.  I feel like watching everything else, or at least observing it all.  The sounds carry so far and I seem to get a bit lost in thought (massive understatement there, I'm sure you'll agree).   Perhaps in the summer we reclaim our days; children are let out of school for six weeks and the luckier of the adults get freedom from work for all of a fortnight.   

In Summer, the light shines through the curtain and reflects on the screen.  All those afternoon matinees, Great Expectations or The Runaway Bus, it's all the same when a quarter of the viewing area is invisible.  The summer sun is brighter than the telly.  There's a rubbish moral right there for you, I suppose.

This has not been the funniest or most in-depth post ever, but, to be honest, I have a fair bit of Serious Life Stuff on my mind right now, events that I'll write about soon.  I'll return to these themes another time.  There'll be jokes and amusing captions and everything.

Whilst we await a return to normal service, here is a picture of a transmitter in the summer.  Sunrise.  See?

It makes me all Yorkshire patriotic.  Sort of.

Bear with me for a while longer, in other words.