Summer In January

In the days when there was such a thing as summer holidays, I used to have bad dreams prior to them; bad dreams of snow in summer. Winter in July. That was Bomb The Bass; perhaps they read my dreams.

There's a symmetry between this and summer in January. Six months between two months of J. The seasons turned upside down. It doesn't seem right, not least to one of the old men of the neighbourhood who was wandering by the beach. How was he? His reaction was spontaneous. It's never easy to deal with someone crying in the street. He must have been crying for six months now, since his wife passed away. It doesn't seem right. She should have died now. In the winter. Except it isn't.

Parked by the beach is a mobile home, a remnant of summer that shouldn't be there in January. There are anglers with their anorexic cranes strained by bait anchor and taut in the sand. A girl sits by the water's edge, reading and idly tossing posidonia kiwis into the idly lapping wavelets.

It's twenty degrees or so, but the chill water and air from the sea is the reminder that this isn't really summer. Once upon a time you used to be able to head into the dunes and find sand banks that were breaks against the dank air and which created sun traps. You still can, I guess, but they've roped them all off. They only want you to look now, not actually be a part of all this nature.

This is not unusual, this summer in January, this gentleness of the sea that allows one of the fishermen to wade out in search of a catch, this stillness of sky a rhapsodical blue above the tops of pines and palms. From the upper terrace, the one onto which it is impossible to venture in summer because of the ferocity of the heat, the wall obliterates everything apart from the peaks of trees and the sky. The sun burns, even in January.

The sounds are those of distant gunshot during the never-ending hunting season, of the buzzing of winter saws cutting into deadwood or making firewood. For over from where the gunshot comes, fires are being built on the streets of Sa Pobla and Muro, fires that will be lit and which which will light the sight of demons playing with their own fire. It seems incongruous that there should be fires. Not now, not when it is summer in January. But when the sun falls into the horizon of the eel farms of Albufera, the cold descends with the tumbling yellow, as though this were a desert.

The smoke will stay you feel, it will hang in the still air. There will be a kind of smog, because of the night and morning fogs that have crept in with stealth and cloaked the stillness of this eery winter-summer, which have wrapped the crystallised spiders' weaves around car wing mirrors, gates and leaves and which have added a rare sound - that of a fog horn belching across the bay of Alcúdia. The fogs clear but their dampness lingers. The sand, which is never absent from the streets and pavements but may be all but invisible, sticks to shoes, glued there by the wetness that tells you this isn't really summer.

There is other incongruity. It is the rogue mosquito at night, a fly or two whizzing in and out of an open door or window, a brown, decaying cricket that should now be dead but which has survived the suicide dive against a brick wall that it would have performed in October and November, wanting it to all end quickly. There is even the sound of scraping legs, buried in an unattended, holiday-home garden, in this late or is it early summer or spring, for the daffodils are shooting as well.

But in a few days, you imagine, it will be winter in January. It's not so unusual to have summer in January, this reverse of the bad dream of winter in July, just as it's not so unusual for the month to head towards a deathly cold and the reactivation of daytime wood burners and heaters which, for now, need only be fired up once the sun has set. And now, at around half past six, it has just about faded completely, leaving only the streaks of red and orange above Sa Pobla and Muro, the red and orange into which will flame different reds and oranges of the Sant Antoni fires.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.