Stepped out of the flat today and into summer. It wasn't just 'warm' (we have had warm days this year - some anyway) but more that the texture of the air itself had changed; thick, heavy and almost liquid. Not quite the sunburnt taste of July-summer air, and nor the metallic no-taste of August, but something inherently early summer.
And as soon as I took in that first taste of true summer air, the inevitable remembering came.
1989.
Seventeen years old, and in the first year of my A-levels. On Saturdays I would walk where I lived in Ickenham into Uxbridge where I would meet my friends (The Saturday Gang) at a bookstall where two of them worked. I had a crush on one of the girls who worked there. For once this was probably returned, but I was too shy to make a move, and beyond slightly un-platonic hand holding, things progressed no further. That unconsummated desire flavoured those days of early summer 1989. Those days were soundtracked by the music I was listening to as well (cassettes bought from Our Price on Uxbridge High Street) - Kreator's Pleasure to Kill, Forbidden's Forbidden Evil, Deathrow's Deception Ignored... A steely early summer for 1989, full of sun and bright blue skies, suburbia everywhere, magical and claustrophobic, things always on the verge of opening up into something else.
Some mystery that never quite revealed itself.
The Saturday Gang as our parents referred to us would gather at one of our friends houses on Saturday night, where we would eat chicken drumsticks in the kitchen and watch Saturday night television, (it was all rock'n'roll and wildness for us. We must have been a parents dream). Sometimes we would catch the tube to London to see a film, or go to the opera (I saw nothing strange in going to the opera and listening to Napalm Death on the way home).
More than anything, that first taste of summer air this morning made me think of the Middlesex Fields. The Middlesex Fields were a ragtaggle collection of half wild fields boarded by Western Avenue and Ickenham, Hillingdon and Uxbridge. They held the Middlesex show there each year, and there was also a dry ski-slope and a swimming pool. Beyond these Metroland treats the fields got wilder and deeper - the Metropolitan line cut through them. There was a river and fenced off woods. Clumps of trees and places you could lose yourself in.
As I passed by the Middlesex Fields on the way to the bookshop to meet the Saturday Gang (and as I think of it now, another member of the Saturday Gang worked in another book shop in town) the fields I glimpsed over the hedges (cow-parsley ditches crammed full of weeds) seemed like some wild and slightly dangerous countryside, the locus of a mystery that never quite revealed itself.
One morning at dawn - one of my friends had stayed the night at my house (we were retaking our maths GCSE at the local college) I remember neither of us could sleep, and we left the house and ended up in the fields. Ghostly place in the white light of summer dawn, slightly forbidden as if we were in some taboo-land - or more accurately a taboo-time. We watched the marquees for the upcoming Middlesex Show half-empty deep in the fields, discussed the possibility of security guards and if there was anyone there. I had made a decision that night to 'ask out' the girl I liked. We walked back across the footbridge over Western Avenue and through the woods to the side of Vyners School. There was a certain section of the woods we didn't like. There was an uneasy tangled atmosphere - summer gone mad with shadows and weeds and trees - and we called this section The Place of Oppressiveness - in a remarkable and enviable turn of originality and poetic phrasing, (There was a place deep in the woods that was a channel of green stucky mud and discarded rusting metal, this was called The Place of Disgustingness).
On the other side of the woods we played on the rope swing above the River Pinn, and we were back home before my parents had got up and they never knew we left the house.
Lessons that day were a nightmare to get through - I remember falling asleep during both Sociology and English. I was never so pleased to get home that evening.
I never asked that girl out by the way. Things that seem so certain and definite at dawn (that most numinous of times) seem quite different in the mundane suburbia of mid-afternoon.
Anyhow, that's the memories that came onto me as I left the flat this morning.
Then I got to work and spent eight hours answering calls about financial products for children and adults, and looking out of the window at the summer holiday sea, and wondering what my seventeen year old self would make of it all.
