Enjoying the Summer?

Despite the heat, I actually am.

I’m writing this before lunch on a Sunday because it’s just too hot to do anything that’s even like work.

Work in this case means cutting branches down and dragging them 200 metres for a fire – or jobs like that.

The work that’s paying for some home improvements like a new boiler that’s being installed on Tuesday is now split between my office and here.

In the shade of a pair of silver birch trees some distance from the office.

I’ve installed a mesh WiFi network and it’s lovely to do video calls with the leaves whispering in the breeze.

I was thirteen for the heatwave of 1976 and it was a time that I didn’t want to end.

My parents rented a maisonette from the council and we had a small, square back garden.

That my fucking dad concreted over.

Still.

That was a minor issue, the younger sister of the next door neighbour stayed for the summer holidays, she was the same age as me and we spent every night talking until late as the skies turned gold, purple and then black.

She was immensely smart, pretty in a way that I couldn’t describe at that time and was the first love of my life.

We wrote to each other for months when she returned home, but the inevitable happened as it will at that age.

She grew up faster than me and moved on.

I thought of her for the first time in fifty years or so yesterday and wherever she is, I hope that she’s had a wonderful life so far.

My parents moved us to a house a mile or so away when was fifteen and life changed again.

And so it went.

A life that picked up speed and somehow got faster, a blur of images from a high speed toboggan run.

All those people.

All those places.

So many that I can’t remember which Caribbean island holiday was which, what happened on a particular work trip to India or Australia or..

You get the idea.

I think that it’s only the weather that’s made me think of 1976 and those moments that felt as if we were frozen in warm amber as we talked until late every night, a little transistor radio providing the soundtrack.

My mum bringing drinks and biscuits out as it got cold, a blanket draped over her arm for us to share, then smiling and going back inside the house.

And now, I lie beneath a tree, typing about a boy whose emotions I can just about remember, his view of the world so different from mine that he could be somebody else entirely.

But a bit of him is still there, his romanticism has been readjusted, his optimism is still with me most of the time and his curiosity has never gone away.

Have I acquired layers of personality and experience over him or is it more complicated than that?

Am I / are we / one personality or a core that is mostly unchanging with a set of other personalities that can be swapped and changed?

This week I’m going to be a number of different people.

Today, I’m almost in neutral gear, listening to music while the dogs wander around – Milo has disappeared but Cairo is asleep under an apple tree next to me

I’m dipping in and out of reading a book while playing with my cameras and gradually getting an understanding of ‘oh. THAT’S how you do that.’

Tomorrow, I’ll be back in work mode along with being almost a passenger when I see a private consultant at 430 to look at my right knee.

Wednesday, I’ll be in full on bastard mode when I meet a 3rd party company to tell them exactly how they’re going to be delivering work for us until December, then I’ll join a senior management call before checking into a hotel.

Then I’ll be meeting a friend for drinks somewhere as it’s her birthday the next day.

It’s Cairo’s birthday the same day.

Remember the date.

After a few drinks, I’ll put my grown up face on and we’ll go for dinner at Simpsons in the Strand.

Maybe Soho after that -who knows? If so, I’ll put on a harder edge and become more or less unapproachable to the outside world.

I’ve blagged a free day off on Thursday, I’ll make a massive fuss of Cairo and probably do a pub lunch.

And I’ll be whatever the dogs want me to be.

But that’s mostly chilled, soft spoken and affectionate.

I’ll still be ‘me’ at the core of all this though.

The idealistic, romantic thirteen year old is somewhere in the mix along with the versions of him that learned a lifetime of lessons, some tough, some wonderful beyond belief.

I wonder what he’d think? Would this life be what he could have imagined? Would he have thought that when he was learning French or German that he’d have dinner with a Paris St Germain footballer or that he’d have some fantastic adventures while working in Berlin, that he’d live in India, meet a god, fly out to Thailand on a whim for a weekend and dare the gods to strike him down during a lightning storm and a monsoon, that he’d trawl the bars of London and Sydney, with dozens of cities in between, that he’d retire with two dogs that he adores, that he’d go back to work, do more travel, host a dinner in Edinburgh Castle for high ranking military officers from around the world, that the few friends that he’s developed over the years are amongst the best people in the world, that fifty years after he first fell in love, he still looks at life with wonder and gratitude.

That the various bits of his personality flow around each other like a kaleidoscope view.

Click.

Click.

View.