Summer in the City

Summer in the City.....

Hot town, summer in the city

Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty

Been down, isn't it a pity

Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead

Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

I spent a night in London.  Heat wave.  A fan on continuously, stirring the turgid air, the window open, but the room still close and breathless.  Weather forecasters are talking of tropical nights - I never heard that before, but if that's the way climate change is going, I may move to a glacier somewhere (while they still exist.....)

In the morning I take a stroll, the streets chaos-free, the neighbours at their country estates....

Any sight of water is refreshing, and green trees, though listless and dusty, are a treat.

Mirrored buildings reach up into the humid sky, reflecting the heat back on the ground, and presumably churning out more heat with their air conditioning units hidden on the roof....

The pavements are hot themselves, and pedestrians carry a sheen of glossy heat.  It's an effort to move, even though the sun is not yet at its zenith....

Even inhaling cool deceptive vapours doesn't help much, though standing still may be a good idea.

The river seems thick.  It slides past like toffee, sticking to the boats and congealing at the shore.....

The skyscrapers look as if they are melting, bars of chocolate about to curl and bend into each other....

Cyclists cool themselves by generating heat which is whipped away to boil pedestrians even more.  There is no getting away from this oppression.

Except within the empty halls of Tate Britain, where some form of climate control means it is forever spring.  Cool marbles and grey walls rest the fevered mind, and a delicate absence of jostle and rumble soothes the hurried stranger.

The sky is far away, the sun even further.  The thickly glazed cupola allows light but not heat, and all the pictures breathe with flowery breezes.

Two young women cradle their babies in pale composure - no beads of sweat stain their silver garments nor streak their bejewelled necks.  They gaze in my direction as if to say Why stray you so far from home?  Why not shelter here awhile?

And their questioning, makes me feel they do not quite trust me, engenders guilt for my reciprocal gaze.  These Cholmondeley Ladies, from four hundred years ago, are cool, and they sit up in bed almost as if they are posing for a portrait.... But I suspect they are looking beyond, behind me, challenging the heat to swallow me and remove the blemish I represent in their lives....

I leave these ice cool ladies, with their swaddled babies, and trickle out into the sweltering day.  The sun is now high and it has burned off the cloud.  I do a bit of socially-distanced mingling with the tourists - and there are quite a few now - and I click at the ornately swaddled Blues and Royals at Horse Guards Parade.  In what I take to be a sign, this horse takes a step forwards and directs a powerful stream of urine in my direction.  I sympathise.  It really must piss you off to have to stand stock still in this heat for hours!  And all for show!

In Trafalgar Square, the fourth plinth not surprisingly has a fly on it..... 

Heather Phillipson’s vast physical and digital sculpture tops the Fourth Plinth with a giant swirl of whipped cream, a cherry, a fly and a drone that transmits a live feed of Trafalgar Square. Entitled THE END it suggests both exuberance and unease, responding to Trafalgar Square as a site of celebration and protest, that is shared with other forms of life .....  (London City Hall website)

Well....  Yes.  I may not know much about art, etc, etc.....

I stop at i Camisa & Son on Old Compton Street to stock up with Italian delicacies, then wend up through Berwick Street, where the market is putting a brave face on the effects of lock down....

And then, wondering just how hard it is to work in construction in this kind of weather.....

I find myself a quiet corner of this confusing city, where a chilled pint of European liquid seems the right thing to consume, and I dissolve into a pool of self-pity, weeping from the exhaustion of an excess of sunshine and pleasure.  

How hard it is to be a gentleman about town these days.....

But at night it's a different world....

Summer in the City

John Sebastian / Mark Sebastian / Steve Boone

LEONTES

[Aside] Too hot, too hot!

To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances;

But not for joy; not joy.

The Winter's Tale

William Shakespeare

And then, not long after I get home, the heavens are rent with thunderous grumbles and the cat scurries under the sofa.  Rain falls from a dark sky....  

The End

After Claude

Landscapes with Trees

The Orange Street entrance to the National Gallery in London takes you (almost) straight to Middelharnis.  Meindert Hobbema's painting of "The Avenue of Middelharnis, 1689" is one of the picures I most like to inhabit, walking down the unpaved road, past the man trimming the saplings in his plot, toward the rusty collection of brick and tile buildings in the distance.  There is a calm there that is a relief from the busy world outside, where Nelson dominates Trafalgar Square and traffic perfumes the air.

But nearby hang some other trees, where Claude Gellee (better known as Claude Lorrain) plays with the effects of light on leaves, delicately idealising landscapes from the Villa Madama in Rome, for example, infusing it with dawn or dusk and creating pastoral scenes from Virgil's poetic world.  His trees form the background to Narcissus and Echo, or shade Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid, or frame a Goatherd and Goats.  The subjects, painted three and a half centuries ago, are curiously quaint to us now, but the shapes of the trees, the exquisite detail of individual leaves and the impression of soughing boughs and fluttering light, sometimes with the sun quite in the viewer's face, are as fresh as if they grew this year.

I rest in the peace of these rooms, not much frequented compared with the buzzing enclosures of the Impressionists, and drink in the greens and golds, bathing my city dirty eyes.

Then, wandering towards the darkening skies of London, I pause to admire Jean Baptiste Camille Corot's "The Four Times of Day," where four canvases depict the same scene at Morning, Noon, Evening and Night.  The dash of the 19th Century, as opposed to the care and craft of the 17th, is apparent here, but there is still a beauty about the trees, the way they reach up toward the light, and drift down toward the night.

Back in the countryside near home, a sunlit afternoon entices me out, and almost in play I place my iphone on the dashboard of my car, some Bach playing on the radio, and I experiment with the light on the autumn trees, some still holding their glorious leaves, some now bare sticks in the sky.  The effect, though uneven and crude is pleasing to the eye, as the treescape slips past the open lens, and an unusual perspective unfolds in the replay.  It's nothing like the scenes created on canvas, but perhaps there is some connection in our delight in woodland, sadly depleted in the modern world, and seemingly undervalued by the bullingdon philistines who sought to sell the remaining arboreal dells for profit.