Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: summer

  • the father & son skateboards

    Bearded guy walking past rather fast along the cobbles holding his cell phone up to type rapidly, with a sprig of green clutched in his other hand, at chest height. As he walks he types and as he types he keeps glancing over at the little torn-off sprout – it’s clear this green is what is informing his flow of ideas this fine morning. I guess he is describing it but can’t shake the sweet thought that it is somehow dictating to him: a poem, a song.

    This street is crowded with ice cream shops which make their own blends onsite. “The surest sign of gentrification,” said boyf as we were queuing in the sunshine to choose between matcha (green tea ice cream) and white chocolate with parmesan. When I first moved in, was it only last week? a man walked past with his skateboarding little son. The father had a skateboard of his own clutched under his free arm and was holding the little boy’s hand. As I watched, the man dropped his boy’s hand, dropped his own much smaller board to the ground, and hopped on. From behind, they were unmistakeably linked: little boy in colourful t-shirt covered with tiny dinosaurs, and drab pants; daddy wearing his own groovy colourful t-shirt (covered in Donald Ducks) and khakis. They set off together, paddling solemnly, right down the middle of the pavement, wearing their genes.

  • the night so vast

    Walking at night through the little woods that runs along the shore. I can hear a muted guitar playing from across the water. The dirty water in the dark looks black and clean as ink. Spring is thickening and the trees reach in from either side, closing the path. You have to be swallowed in it. The low thrum of summer night conversation peppers along the canal. The smell of pot. The smell of cigarettes. The clinking of old bottles as a man wheeling his laden bicycle stops under a streetlamp to readjust them all so tenderly in their bags, with furrowing care as though he were collecting them to keep. When I turned down last night an invitation to the birthday party of a man who lives in a van in a village of vans in a thicket where the cherry trees were all pink in April his brother, who’d invited me, said, You should come, we will have a fire in a barrel. Like New York. His brother, he said, had a telescope and this was a telescope party. “Saturn,” he said, the German way, “and her rings and… Jupiter.” I turned for home under the linden trees and he told me how every village had its linden once: with a bench running round it, the Dorflinden. I’m alone now, in the manner of people who don’t go to parties, and my eyes are swollen from crying, and sore. The headache lifts and disintegrates from my shoulders as I walk on, caring for little and everything, reaching the peace inside like dark water. Right at the far end the moon hovers low over the broadening trees and the water, a doorway to infinite peace, an intermittently rattling blind, a prize.

  • echt Kinderbilder

    I just saw a Berliner sitting with legs planted apart in the sunshine and hugely enjoying his hot dog – or some kind of meat that will never die forced into a large white bread roll. In his opposite hand he held a catering-size bottle of red chilli sauce and was squeezing a gout of chilli into the open end of the roll each time he took a fresh mouthful. Though perhaps ‘fresh’ in this context is not quite the right word.

    The sun is shining. Four men spilled out of an art gallery wearing hats and overcoats and one said, “Das sind echt Kinderbilder!” – those are kids’ paintings – and all of them laughed. In unison like an old school barbershop quartet. I caught the eye of a little elderly lady wearing green and she gave me, astonishingly, her mute and carefully guarded smile.

  • state of sunshone

    Queensland. The Sunshine State. Skin Cancer Capital of the World. Spending as much time in the hammock under the trees as I can possibly afford, trying to absorb enough warmth and light and birdsong to slingshot me over the sudden cliff face of winter. A friend writes from Berlin: it is near zero. And I read this in all kinds of symbolist ways. Meanwhile another friend over there has made a grim art project: photos of Berlin skies and of London, side by side: who has the most sunlight? In Berlin they measure the hours of sunshine, in winter, and announce it as part of the weather report: when I was living there, in January there were 22 hours of sunshine for the month. That’s right, the month. We didn’t crawl into Spring until early May, at which time I spoke to my Mum on the phone. “It’s 20 degrees!” I told her, excitedly. I had had to go buy new, lighter socks and scour the second hand shops for a t-shirt. “Oh, I know,” said Mum, “it’s only been 21 here. We’ve had the heater on.”

    How I pored over the Queensland complaints sprouting all over Facebook. “Ooh it’s chilly!” “Had to wear my cardigan on the bus to work this morning.” How I longed to move back and become one of those Queenslanders who complains when they have to put socks on. How I quail before the bellowing fire in my lungs that comes of walking on the stone streets of an iron nation steeping in ice for three-quarters of the year.

  • cafe calm

    cafe calm

    It was breathlessly hot. Almost every inch of Berlin seems to be paved. I went out with a friend who has a dog. The cafe we found has three guardian trees, sentinels of sensibility on a long glaring featureless street. The dog flung himself onto the shaded pavement. The cafe owner brought him a basin of water. He brought us menus written on little lined notebooks, with pictures of writers pasted inside. They made perfect coffee and perfect eggs. The owner, a motherly, middle-aged gay man in a blue gingham shirt, came over and said, holding up two biscuits between his thumb and forefinger, “And is my little friend allowed to have something to eat?” He crouched by the dog and stroked his head, offering the crunchy treats coaxingly. The awning over our heads was caramel-coloured and had strings of golden lights looped underneath. The tables had little sprouting pots of flowers on them and those glass sugar dispensers with a tilted steel nipple like round fat ducklings. We gazed up and down the street, falling into silence, stunned by this unusual heat. I told my companion, cafes save my life every week. What would this street be without this oasis? A bleak, suburban hopelessness. Cafes give the feeling that human civilization has been for something. They collect up the beauties of what we have made. This lantern, this music, this length of printed cloth, this sturdy tumbler just right for the grasp. From a cafe vantage point one can sit and look out. One gazes on the world passing ceaselessly, in starts and spurts, and says, Aye. So it is. Such is life. This is us. Here we are. It’s a funny old world. And so it goes.

    H2O HoL coffee closeup

  • true dat

    I saw a gorgeous black girl climbing off the train yesterday in this heatwave, her hair was intricately braided in pulpy masses and then the braids woven into a long plait, her cork soles were three inches high and a tiny skirt swished around her legs. Her shoulder bag said in huge letters, AFRICA IS THE FUTURE.

    H2O HoL free the people fuck your god

  • midsummer

    midsummer

    Midsummer. Like a midwife: easing us through the transit and the heat.

    H2O HoL breakfast tea

  • scandinavian tile

    scandinavian tile

    My host has Scandinavian taste and I love her house. The green river falls past the end of the garden. In my early twenties I visited and she and I ran down and flung ourselves in, again and again, fetching up winded downstream against the gravel island, hanging onto branches. You walked all the way back up the path and plunged back in. That was summer. The living room is populated with artefacts from an adventurous life. The upstairs office has rifles, a hammock, old round-shouldered business cards tacked to the corkboard with extra digits penciled in front of each telephone number. The whole house is filled with swimming trophies, and pennants for tennis. Her son was born in Africa and her daughter in Kalimantan. “I think we helped destroy the rainforest,” said my friend sadly, the first night I arrived when we were reminiscing about Indonesia, our lost homeland. She loves yellow and orange and the kitchen and bathroom are tiled in exuberant 70s clay, handmade tiles, each one of which is different to its neighbour. There is a photo of me and my two brothers and her daughter, average age six or seven, taking a bath together in a maze of these tiles, so small and the white bathtub so generous that it was intimate yet not crowded.

    H2O HoL orange flower on construction fence