Old Evening

The sun hangs there all day, and everyone heads down the beach at lunchtime, but the blueness of the sky disturbs me and I spend my lunchtime in Waterstones instead. Book-cool floors, the calming influence of paperback spines and hardback covers.
I catch the bus home after work, and the evening outside seems an old one, as if it is being remembered. Some remnant of a more innocent time, remembered in old age, or on the verge of a reluctant sleep. An old man plays a single drum in the doorway of a shop. The sunlight on the pavements is gold and yellow. The bus fills up with people. A baby cries happily next to me. The old woman sat opposite me makes cooing faces to the infant, and I think this has been going on forever.
The year speeds up now, lurches into the first warm phase of the year. There is something naked and vulnerable about it all, and the euphoria is laced with a certain feverish quality. A delicate trace of concrete and tarmac and playgrounds late in August (so hot you could cook an egg on the slide!). I think instead of woods and rivers, fields on the edge of town, and something cooler in the ice-cream sticky air.