It Might As Well Have Rained Until September

Damn, damn, damn. It's happened again. September has started. Summer is going, fading, being forgotten. It's no use saying it's still summer because it feels different. What a difference a day makes. From one with an A to one with an S. It happens every year. The first of September, and all the regrets start flooding in along with the floods that the predictable change in the weather brings. When it was still June and July, there was always the next day, the next week, the next month even for whatever it was. Summer stretched for an eternity. September would never come. Nightswimming. Remembering that night. September wasn't coming soon. All of a sudden it was. And now it has.

September is deep-rooted in the consciousness. It is what makes it even more unbearable. We all know what September meant. An end and an unwanted beginning. And as it wound on, September became, if you were lucky, the misty morning giving way to an early autumn heat. But it was also always the month of gathering and swifter twilight. The twilight of summer.

A Mallorcan September is not very different, but there is the added poignancy, as 31 August turns into 1 September, of vitality being sucked out, of a draining, of an enervation. Life starts to go because people wish it to go, wish it to pass with the days being counted down until the shutters are pulled down, until the chairs and tables are piled away for one last time, until the cleaning-up is performed one final time. Wishing time away, wishing the onset of winter desolation, the non-time of a Mallorcan winter, deprived of a life force. How strange that this desolation should be so craved.

Come September and remember a dream from back in May when you panicked that it was September and that the summer had been missed. All those forgotten or missed fiestas. All those forgotten or missed sultry nights. All those forgotten or missed beaches. All those forgotten or missed tumbles in the surf. All those forgotten or missed shouts and laughs amidst the splashes.

And the end of August change in weather is the perfect storm to create the perfect end to what cannot any longer truly be summer. September is the half month. Half here, half there, not knowing which way it is really going. Unreliable. Unpredictable. The perfect storm brings down the curtain on the final act of colossal heat and immediately it has finished, you want it reinstated, want more, want an encore.

Come back.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.