Summer-Slow Day

Walking back from a friend's last night, a little drunk due to afternoon drinking (lager, cider, ale) and in the sudden evening (the last hour of true daylight) everything is deep in summer. Oh, here we are at last, summer, and not the summers of recent years, pale insubstantial things, but those old and nostalgic summers full of distance-shimmer, violet twilight sky and the taste of the air all sunburnt and unreal.
Up the steep streets and onto the Old Shoreham Road, pass by the petrol station, and try to catch a glimpse of a ghost of myself working there. I can't ever imagine having worked there now, let alone for half a decade.
By the time I get home it is barely dark. I pour myself a pint of water, put on an album, and immediately fall asleep.
I wake this morning with the curtains still open, and the sky a bright and unimpeachable blue. Breathe in the air through the windows left open all night, and yes, this is summer again. I check the time; 7:26am. I get up. I make a cup of tea. I feel bright and alive and it's not even 8:00am.
I spend the morning pottering of the internet, reading (A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland) and listening to music. I have a shower and forget to do washing. At midday I leave the house.
The heats swamps me as soon as I close the door - I was expecting it to be warm - but this hot? The beach is crowded. I run into Genevieve and Kate at The View on the seafront. I join them for a coke, and they ask me why I bought my leather jacket with me. I have no answer to this. The hottest day since May last year, and I am afraid that it might get a bit chilly.
I head on into town, and veer left away from the seafront to go up to Western Road. I run into James and Lee from work. Drink more coke and a cheap energy drink and try to forget we all have work the next day. After I leave I go and get a coffee from one of the numerous coffee shops along Western Road (as if I haven't had enough caffeine already). I take my coffee up to St Anne's Well Park and in the sun which is so strong I begin to fear for sunburn (I've only ever had sunburn once in my life, over the heatwave of 2005).
I'm quite happy in the park, finishing off a picture I started on Friday night, a head shot of Joe as an imagined detective. As usual I get lost in it, and everything around me fades and yet becomes somehow heightened - an impossible and pleasant state of things, and when it is time to go, everything is sharper and clearer, more itself somehow. I taste the heat coming off the tarmac, and the brightness of the sunlight on the cars is sharp as sudden childhood memories.
6:00pm now, and through the gap in the curtains, I watch the shadow of a chimney fall on the roof of the house. Somewhere I hear a plane - a light aircraft, and there is, below all this, the sound of birds, low and insistent on this slow summer evening.