{Contemplating the hot dash.}
{Everybody is waiting. Waiting for the cool change.}
Heatwaves are for surviving; they are not conducive for working. Heatwaves are for darkening the house, blocking out the sun’s glare. For icepacks wrapped in tea towels and worn at the back of neck, if lying prone, or across the shoulder, if moving about, or pressed to the temple, if sitting crumpled in a chair. For washing the quilt that normally takes an age to dry but in this weather bleaches and dries and crisps in the sun in a single afternoon. For washing the pet bedding too, should energy permit. Heatwaves remind me of my parents’ bathroom of my childhood years when the ceiling was made of two large angled panels of glass and a central supporting beam. At the height of summer and in the middle of the day when the sun was overhead, an umbrella was needed if you hoped to use the toilet; one large black canopy, it afforded you a circle of shade and saved you from a disagreeable scorching. One large black canopy, which you held over your head with your left hand or tucked its metal arm between your shoulder and your head tipped to one side. It proved quite the dance for one, and was only for emergencies. If summer calls for one thing, it calls for a letting go of the reins. You follow its lead, not the other way around. You leave to go to the post office before before heat’s full assault. And, if you’ve a glass-roofed bathroom, you use it early in the day, lest you favour discomfort. Heatwaves are for surviving. And heatwaves, it transpires, are for reading short stories in the quiet of night, or whilst awaiting a promised cool change. I am currently reading Katherine Mansfield’s The Collected Stories. In between A Dill Pickle and The Little Governess, bee rafts are checked, water is topped up in the makeshift birdbaths in the back garden, a few quick emails are responded to. Je Ne Parle Pas Français, mist the budgies, Bliss. Wash the dishes with a head full of images of marigolds, verbena, grey cats and their black shadows, lights in windows, dusk, big half-hoops of perspiration under the armpits, good intentions, Vanity as a bright bird, geranium carpets flung over pinkish walls, and a dog named Snooker, and hop back to At the Bay.
The tide was out; the beach was deserted; lazily flopped the warm sea. The sun beat down, beat down hot and fiery on the fine sand, baking the grey and blue and black and white-veined pebbles. It sucked up the little drop of water that lay in the hollow of the curved shells; it bleached the pink convolvulus that threaded through the sand hills. Nothing seemed to move but the small sand-hoppers. Pit-pit-pit! They were never still.
Over there the weed-hung rocks that looked at low tide like shaggy beasts come down to the water to drink, the sunlight seemed to spin like a silver coin dropped into each of the small pools. They danced, they quivered, and minute ripples laved the porous shores.
(VII, At the Bay, Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories, Penguin Classics, p. 224)
+ From the RSPCA (Victoria): "Burwood East Shelter would love people to donate plastic take away food containers with their lids. These will be used to create large iceblocks for the dogs in the kennels to assist in keeping them cool over summer (with treats frozen inside of course). We can use all sizes, but they will need to be clean and in good order for us to use them."
+ How to tend to wildlife: Animals 'dropping from trees' as record heatwave scorches Victoria, Dimity Barber, Berwick Leader, 15th January, 2014
+ Under the water, with a two-colour eye-glass, something similar, a new arists' book
