Life Would Be Ecstasy

On a Sunday afternoon. The temperature’s about 88. On a Sunday afternoon. Escape the interior furnace. Couldn’t get away too soon. The cars pull up. Out tumble children, out stumble old folk, out pops a lilo. There’s a sort of a buzz. A constant hum. A constant contentment against the wash of waves. Picnics and umbrellas. Chatter, shouts, yelps, splashes, laughs. The back-and-forth pit and pat of paddles tennis-ing. The bounce of a football, a Barnes Wallis catching the wave together with a mini boogie board. Lying and sleeping. Strolling and distant, mind emptied of anything but that hum and the sound and vision of a beach Sunday in August. Floating and rolling. Even the gulls are languid, hanging on thermals, all but motionless. Heat and breeze, and everything stops for one of the last Sundays of summer, of real summer. Yellow alerts of temperatures, as they are greater than 88 by mid-afternoon, slowing everyone down but not the kids who race everywhere, constant blurs in motion, to the water, into the water, then back, grab a mask, back to the water, cajoling, arguing, shouting; little Bobby builders constructing castles along the coast. 60s latin soul congas on an I-Pod and sunny 90s Philly rap twists and winds from a system. The beach bars packed, bowls of mussels, the coals of a barbecue, how the smell from a grill can spark off nostalgia, chunks of ice clunking into glass, excited babble and bursts of laughter. The guys drumming their washboards, checking out the honeys from the back, the summer’s a natural aphrodisiac. Summer time. On a Sunday afternoon. August high summer and holiday, but summer’s coming to an end but it isn’t. The long hours of a Sunday afternoon, the endless sun and the endless hum, the constancy of every year and every Sunday the same. Think of the summers of the past. Nothing else seems to matter in this endless summer and on this endless Sunday in August. We’ll keep on spending sunny days this way.

Don’t Bother

August is the sleep month. Some businesses close altogether, some work only half days, and some probably would prefer that no-one bothered them. People really can’t be bothered in August. The heat is gruelling, and for one part of society that does bother – drivers – the heat makes going anywhere a gruelling event of cars baked by the sun or frozen by air-conditioning or blown by sand and confronted by endless streams of tourists with lilos crossing the roads where they shouldn’t.

No-one can be bothered. To do anything invites an outpouring of sweat, to do nothing invites an outpouring of sweat, a pair of clammy hands, a pair of feet dirtied by the dust that insinuates itself inside sandals, a desperate desire for something cold to drink, a seeking of shade or the wind of the beach. Pity the poor delivery men, pushing trolleys, unloading and loading, drenched after a couple of minutes and spending the day climbing in and out of steamy truck cabs, sliding on the seat, unable to grip the wheel because of the wetness of the hands and the boiling plastic. Or the butane chaps, humping the weights of containers from the lorry, parping impatiently as they come across an empty bottle outside a gate, ten euro notes that become immediately absorbent, like toilet paper, as they are handed over by customers cursing the need to step out into the sun. Or the police on control duties dressed in their long trousers, staring ominously from behind the ever-present very dark and sinister sunglasses, tetchy and inclined to give someone hell. Or waiters, often also in long trousers, forced to move in a constant routine of picking up, setting down, wiping sweat from their wrists across their damp foreheads in an attempt to not soak the order docket, the heat and smell of a lunch leaping at them or the quickly dripping glasses of iced glasses rolling droplets down the arm or onto those trousers. Or anyone who moves from a ninety-degree exterior to an Arctic interior, the constant shifts in body temperatures, up and down like erratic blood-pressure monitors, causing sniffs and lightheadedness.

No-one can be bothered. Well some of us. Bloggers. The soporific swelter of mid-afternoon makes the eyes close, the gentle scraping of the fallen bougainvillaea bracts on the terrace lulls, the breeze through the persiana wafts the lace, waving it lazily, idly. And then a moto cracks the somnolence, a lizard jerks quizzically on the terrace door, kids with a football suddenly bounce past with incongruous energy, one of those two wasps-in-one things darts into vision, a flying black malevolence, one part docked to the mother ship; and some of us can then be bothered – to go to the beach. And then you realise that summer is only just about to start. It’s back – the footy.