What We Did On Our Holidays

If anticipation is the real pleasure then summer is the high I know I will inevitably one day have to come down from.

For weeks there is no let up in the heat. Skies are pale blue, occasional clouds wispy and haphazard, spray painted to the far horizon by a device that clearly needs refilling. This close to the ocean there is often a breeze, but even the breeze knows its limits when the mercury hits thirty.

Time stops. Without the bustle of school children the streets feel deserted. Even the dogs and their walkers have to conserve their energy. Nights are for not sleeping. The water on the Tamar glistens and reflects back the pale skies, but the tide seems to be out more often than not these days.

Last year’s cygnets, now young adults, take up residence near the shoreline of Salt Mill Park. The moult is their summer holiday, rendered flightless for six weeks as they shed and grow new feathers. The pace of their life – or lack of pace – suits a climate where everything is motionless, everything is waiting.

Rain comes, but only as brief but sharp downpours. Blink and you’ll miss it. Grass remains the colour of straw. In places feet have walked it smooth and hard as concrete. The two young seagulls, fat and brown-feathered, bigger already than their parents and strident as a broken car alarm, have moved from the front of the property into the neighbouring car park.

Time is passing.

The swans prepare to fly again, chasing each other in mock fights as they rebuild muscles that have atrophied over the summer. On Sundays there is now worship on the green – a new brand of outdoor religious service, with a dressed down preacher lecturing a congregation perched expectantly on fold out seats. Behind them river traffic gently drifts past.

One weekend a brass band plays old standards to an appreciative crowd of pensioners, reminding me of the time I came across a similar ensemble performing a rendition of David Bowie’s Life on Mars in a park in Christchurch, New Zealand. As the music faded that day I’d mentally added the sound of a ringing telephone that gives the song its signature fade out ending.

In St Budeaux the black hole advertising hording unexpectedly comes to life, as though it has taken someone eighteen months to find the on switch. The barber shop closes for the summer, leaving me to ponder how it takes the woman working there five minutes, and the man almost half an hour, to give you exactly the same haircut.

What did we do on our holidays? We breathed in and out. We slept when we should’ve been awake and stayed awake when we should’ve been sleeping. We begged for change and ran in fear of it.

Most of it was in the silence, the background hum of traffic and the assorted calls of the birds, noises lost to consciousness much like tinnitus or the sound of the sea contained within all the shells that litter the shoreline.

Words cannot adequately capture the view. Summer spray paints itself like the distant clouds. Even as I live through it, it is becoming little more than a memory.