Heatwave Ennui

July tumbles on and I have a week off work.
The heatwave continues. We haven't had heat like this - not for this amount of time - for at least four years. The last time we had a sustained amount of heat, it was the summer of 2009. Today, I strolled into town, went to Dave's Comics, the headed back along the beach; the melancholy smell of barbecues, people trying to balance in the waves, that feverish tinge on the skin of afternoon drinkers. Sunburn-nostalgia, holiday pressure.
I got back about 5:00pm, and spent the next five or six hours working in the 'Malcolm at the Crossroads' comic strip, which I hope to finish this week. These five or six hours were spent measuring, drawing panels, lettering, inking the panel-edges and the lettering. Boring stuff but necessary. I'm still not sure why it takes so long to do.
Resonances from heat like this include:
Looking down Long Lane in Hillingdon. Scarred old trees and the Ruislip 98 bus. Still-metal taste of London suburbia. Blue skies like steel. No seas. No tide. I was writing the other day about a specific summer memory (1992) associated with Long Lane which is why it seems to have come back so strongly today.
Worcester. Obviously. I tend to think of Worcester as an autumnal place, but I sometimes forget (well, not really, I rarely forget anything) that I spent two summers. Today has reminded me of that first summer, 1997; 136 London Road, Al, Paul and myself tumbling (like this July) about that cool shadowed four storey early, early, early Victorian house. That long slow curve of London Road into the city centre, and at the base of the hill, thinking about The Strawberry Thief or The Strawberry Thieves, and playing with the words thinking I might use them for something, a story or a song, but not knowing they had already been used for something.
Malta. I think it was walking down by the beach today that bought up Malta. I was five when I lived there. 1977. However. Some kind of pool. It was an outdoors pool, and it was shadowed. Cool water. Slippery tiles. I remember playing with an older boy around some kind of tap. Turning on the tap. Turning off the tap. This was fun. The smell of tar (slow turn of black barely-liquid) being laid on the road. A roadworks smell. I remember a butterfly in the desert caught on the tarmac, and I tried to free it and only pulled the wings off.
You know what I should do tomorrow?
I should get up as I would do if I was at work, leave the house at the same time I would normally, pass by the same people I pass by every day, but instead of going to work, I'll do all those things I usually long to do when I go to work but can't; sit for hours in a coffee shop (ah, the smell of coffee shops in the morning!), walk to the woods at Stanmer and sleep on the edges of the trees and listen to the wind in the leaves, or catch the train to London, further, maybe even back to Ickenham, or North, to Worcester, or maybe even further, to Scotland, to Kinloss and Forres.
But what will probably happen is that I'll ignore the alarm and go back to sleep.