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Summer in the city

Summer in the city: it brings about a certain sense of solidarity. I never understood this growing up: a city was the last place I wanted to be when the sun came out and the temperature crept higher. I imagined the ideal place to be the seaside, or later on the countryside; places free from the overpowering stench of diesel fumes that overheating buses belched out. I wanted to be far away from the impatient car drivers whose arms hung out the car windows tapping the roof or hot metal doors of their tin ovens. Music spilled out from the opened windows of cars, shops and houses. Stiletto heels began sinking into melting tarmac, newspapers smelt baked and crispy in the sun as they yellowed to crinkles like desiccated insect wings, and the occasional waft of freshly cut grass in the municipal parks was a welcome distraction, yet at the same time made me yearn for somewhere where the air was fresh with salt and seaweed and perhaps coconut scented suntan oil.

Towards the evening as the heat relented and the sun dropped behind roofs to leave a bruised purple sky, hosed arcs of water provided relief to parched back gardens and adventurous families might have sparked up a barbeque. It was stifling. Evening papers and local news seemed to love making a drama out of the heat: people wilting on the underground, possible hosepipe bans, dried up lakes, office workers flaking out in parks at lunchtimes, ice cream sellers running out of their wares, and promises that the worse was yet to come.

But then I got my wish and escaped the city and counted my lucky stars every time the sun came out. Hot traffic fume memories faded away as the sky stretched overhead for miles in every direction. But feeling smug as butterflies waltz with each other in idyllic country lanes where wild grasses and flowers burst out of the hedgerows is all very well, but you soon come to notice that there aren’t that many people around to share the feel good factor with. Farmers are busy as usual, their tractors trundling along displaying a scary array of cutting and slicing scissorhands. Diesel scented air lingers in their wake. There aren’t even any squabbling sparrows, but instead the forlorn whistling peep of a bird of prey circling high up above.

I hadn’t even noticed these things properly until I returned to the city in a heat wave. I drove around with the air conditioning blasting out as ferociously as the music tumbling from the stereo. Everybody wants everybody else to share their music on sunny days, and I was no exception I’m afraid. At the garage I clapped my hands for joy at the luxury of a jet wash, and as boy racers waxed their wheels and glanced knowingly under their bonnets, I felt like we were all in a Christina Aguilera pop video, and that I should start spraying all us hot city dwellers with the cold jet wash hose. I didn’t of course. I would have got my face punched in. But it felt gleeful, like here we all were sharing the benefits and drawbacks of summer in the city, and if we wanted a cool bottle of beer in a pub with a garden we darn well could. You don’t get country pubs in the real countryside. People don’t seem to want to sit outside with their drink when they’ve been toiling in the fields all day. That’s what I imagine, anyway.

But all these differences in urban and rural life got me thinking about how different it makes us as people. Kids in the city may wish for a field to play in when the sun comes out, instead of having to skate over cracked paving stones and around dog muck, and kids in the country feel like they are dying of boredom with no friends close by and no street corners to hang out on. There is no level playing field, perhaps no playing field left at all in many places. And yet it’s not long now until the country’s 16 – 18 year olds receive a clutch of grades to stick down on a CV and are judged by employers and admissions officers in moments that change the courses of their lives forever. Nobody really notes if they had to struggle across hot and sweaty city centres to get to school in time for exams or whether they were delivered there by a school bus providing door to door service, or perhaps even their parents’ air conditioned modern day chariot. But it will all boil down to a few grades on a sheet of paper, and something niggles away at me that this isn’t entirely fair, but in this heat that’s as far as my thought processes will go for today.

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added 23/6/05