dirt, heat, water, bliss
It’s a heatwave in London. The season’s set in. After the second or third sweltering day the city’s filth seeps up to the surface. A fine layer of grit coats the parked cars and sash windows of the terraces on my road. Invisible cobwebs materialise in the eaves, sagging with desiccated husks. The trees slouch down the pavement like parched teens begging for beer they can’t afford.
Each morning I send my children off to school in crisp buttoned polos with minty-fresh mouths and a few hours later they're back at the front door, pleading for water and scraps, stinking like Dickensian guttersnipes. It doesn’t matter how often I scrub their little fingers and toes in this weather or hose them down on the roof — the dirt creeps back, streaking their faces with grime, filling their nails like black crescent moons. In London, heat draws the dirt up, the accumulated grit of a city built on crumbling Victorian sewers.
Like all great cities, London is a city built on the backs of the working poor. The dirt’s easy to forget here because of all the rich people with their glittering stuff, plus it helps that it rains a lot. But in a heat wave everyone in London feels the grit and the grime, everyone is absorbed by the unwashed mass of this filthy, seething old town.
But there is joy in the filth. Fun to be had! For one thing, everyone goes OUT out. The pubs erupt and overflow, sloshing with piss-coloured pints and laughter. In the long evenings you can hear people hollering affectionate insults in the alleys that will later become sucker punches. On a hot summer night it can feel as if the whole city’s on a bender, even when you’re laying alone in your bed, sleepless and sweating. Plus if you can’t bear it, there’s always the countryside.
Last weekend I spent one night in a farmer’s field in Oxfordshire, camping with friends. A “festival” is what it was called, there were tickets and wristbands, but it was teeny-tiny — a few hundred people at most. (I can’t bear crowds at the moment.) It reminded me of the bush parties we had in Ontario corn fields and ravines growing up, except with pounding techno and gourmet food trucks selling wood-fired sour dough pizza.