Summer In January

In the days when there was such a thing as summer holidays, I used to have bad dreams prior to them; bad dreams of snow in summer. Winter in July. That was Bomb The Bass; perhaps they read my dreams.

There’s a symmetry between this and summer in January. Six months between two months of J. The seasons turned upside down. It doesn’t seem right, not least to one of the old men of the neighbourhood who was wandering by the beach. How was he? His reaction was spontaneous. It’s never easy to deal with someone crying in the street. He must have been crying for six months now, since his wife passed away. It doesn’t seem right. She should have died now. In the winter. Except it isn’t.

Parked by the beach is a mobile home, a remnant of summer that shouldn’t be there in January. There are anglers with their anorexic cranes strained by bait anchor and taut in the sand. A girl sits by the water’s edge, reading and idly tossing posidonia kiwis into the idly lapping wavelets.

It’s twenty degrees or so, but the chill water and air from the sea is the reminder that this isn’t really summer. Once upon a time you used to be able to head into the dunes and find sand banks that were breaks against the dank air and which created sun traps. You still can, I guess, but they’ve roped them all off. They only want you to look now, not actually be a part of all this nature.

This is not unusual, this summer in January, this gentleness of the sea that allows one of the fishermen to wade out in search of a catch, this stillness of sky a rhapsodical blue above the tops of pines and palms. From the upper terrace, the one onto which it is impossible to venture in summer because of the ferocity of the heat, the wall obliterates everything apart from the peaks of trees and the sky. The sun burns, even in January.

The sounds are those of distant gunshot during the never-ending hunting season, of the buzzing of winter saws cutting into deadwood or making firewood. For over from where the gunshot comes, fires are being built on the streets of Sa Pobla and Muro, fires that will be lit and which which will light the sight of demons playing with their own fire. It seems incongruous that there should be fires. Not now, not when it is summer in January. But when the sun falls into the horizon of the eel farms of Albufera, the cold descends with the tumbling yellow, as though this were a desert.

The smoke will stay you feel, it will hang in the still air. There will be a kind of smog, because of the night and morning fogs that have crept in with stealth and cloaked the stillness of this eery winter-summer, which have wrapped the crystallised spiders’ weaves around car wing mirrors, gates and leaves and which have added a rare sound – that of a fog horn belching across the bay of Alcúdia. The fogs clear but their dampness lingers. The sand, which is never absent from the streets and pavements but may be all but invisible, sticks to shoes, glued there by the wetness that tells you this isn’t really summer.

There is other incongruity. It is the rogue mosquito at night, a fly or two whizzing in and out of an open door or window, a brown, decaying cricket that should now be dead but which has survived the suicide dive against a brick wall that it would have performed in October and November, wanting it to all end quickly. There is even the sound of scraping legs, buried in an unattended, holiday-home garden, in this late or is it early summer or spring, for the daffodils are shooting as well.

But in a few days, you imagine, it will be winter in January. It’s not so unusual to have summer in January, this reverse of the bad dream of winter in July, just as it’s not so unusual for the month to head towards a deathly cold and the reactivation of daytime wood burners and heaters which, for now, need only be fired up once the sun has set. And now, at around half past six, it has just about faded completely, leaving only the streaks of red and orange above Sa Pobla and Muro, the red and orange into which will flame different reds and oranges of the Sant Antoni fires.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Don’t Be Cold, Don’t Be Angry To Me

The 1970s were responsible for some real horrors perpetrated in the name of music. Pilot were not in the A-list of offenders, but they did bequeath us “January” and memory of a lead singer who looked like a girly Peter Marinello, which was saying something, given that the new George Best appeared to have stepped out of Pan’s People.

“Don’t be cold, don’t be angry to me.” I’m all in favour of obscure lyrics, but how does a month display its anger? And why is it angry “to” me? Wrong preposition. But nevertheless, now I think of it, it is – a month being angry – rather poetic. Pilot were the new Wordsworths. Well, maybe not.

January isn’t usually angry. But it stores up trouble. It is the month to reconnoitre the tree tops. You wander lonely staring at clouds, but in fact at the pines, their branches crowned with the coconut shies of the caterpillars’ furry, testicular wombs. Through the needles, though, you see only blue sky, for this January is like so many – alarmingly warm and bright. Don’t be cold with me; not at the moment it isn’t.

The warmth, however, is the threat of trouble being stored up for when the weather breaks and for when the caterpillar nests also break and tip their crawling caravans earthwards. In the lonely days of January, the cats can sleak around and scavenge undisturbed, but then they come across the caterpillars. From the litters of moths to the litter of a cat prone on the ground, feigning sleep but in fact stone cold dead.

You make me sad with your eyes. I’m not so sure it does. September is the sad month. January’s melancholic, but because of its silence. Until it bursts into flames. The eyes of January look down on the fires of mid-month and on the beasties that roam the villages and towns spitting the sparklers of Sant Antoni. January, the curious month when fiesta has no right to occur but does so in an incendiary fashion that is more pyrotechnic than the summer fireworks; more pyrotechnic because houses, whole streets are in the line of fire.

The month’s eyes cast a glance also at how the shorelines shift with the wind. Beaches’ edges are moulded and sculpted by the sea’s changes in direction and by the harvesting of marine crops that form bulges and mounds which, from a distance, appear as rocky outcrops newly exposed by displaced sand but are the abstract grotesques of packed seaweed and posidonia. The eyes watch as you bounce along the trampolines of the springy and spongy sand topped with its ocean scrap.

You’re telling me lies. This is what makes you worry about January. It’s what it’s telling you about what’s to come. It cascades from the skies at the stroke of the new year with the cheer of optimism, but it can be deceitful and deceiving. What’s to come? The clear skies of January can just as easily become the dark clouds of gloom, but unlike an English January when you slowly count off the days to the onset of spring, here you might hope for its delay. January doesn’t tarry though. It rushes in the spring and thoughts of the season with the swiftness and surprise of a bore racing along an estuary. Maybe it’s an illusion, but no; the days are already longer. And then suddenly January’s gone. Don’t go, don’t go.

Why would you not want it to go? January is non-month, it barely exists other than to be set light to. But this is what makes it the month that it is. Because when it’s gone, the pretend time of fiesta and holiday from early December goes with it. And things begin to start all over again. The never-ending cycle and repetition of Mallorca’s months and seasons.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.