The sky above was a smear of Capri Blue, interspersed with dots of cloud and the trails of aircraft. The sun prickled and mottled my arms and neck. The sweat clamoured on my brow until loose beads dripped, salty, into the wells of eyes and nose.
Yep, another walk. Summer reports (this is the penultimate before the heat shimmer over very green grass and new blue home shirts that will be Portman Road come 3ish on the 30th) are always sweeter than winter. The long days, the persistence of flies, the Amber Solaire and the display of tattoos and white calves and bra straps are mere interludes in the heat. Our local Currys has sold out of mechanised fans. In these days of open doors and windows, of cooling sea breezes and influxes of Dagenham pipers parking badly and enunciating loudly in estuary English, the football season seems like a world apart. But here it comes.
My walks are once more conducted in solitude. Paula works. Then she works some more. Then she comes home and all is sweetly, disposed domesticity. No further worries about arse sizing or that thin flub of blubber she carries around her middle. This isn't the pages of Vogue. We don't pretend to live.
So I walk, and enjoy the odd sighting of egrets and cormorants drying in the sun, and the rustle of hedgerow which could be the May Queen or, more likely, a rabbit. The paths are drier than a Ustinov soliloquy, the dust blows great swathes of brownish mist and the grass is as filled with straw as Worzel's thinking head. I kid myself that it keeps me fit, but where this happens, or when, is anyone's guess.
Tel emerged from the shadows of pretending to care for his missus this week, head poking out the parapet, a silver-tongued cavalier under siege from the local roundheads. Mrs Tel is back driving. She even wore shorts last week. There were no anticipated tell-tale signs of uterine interference on display; no goitres or padded bandages or thin trickles of watery plasma. She drove back into the heat like that motorcyclist on the cover of a Meat Loaf album by spending "a few days'n'Braintree wiv Tone'n'Sandy'n'the neffew". Tel didn't bother joining her, so we spent a few evenings down the boozer, reminiscing and joshing and drinking too much.
There's been an unfortunate event this week. My ex-wife, stymied thus far in trying to extract money from me to pay for her and 'a friend' to travel to Thailand in October ("I only need £3k now because my mum has paid the flights and my dad is giving me £1k for the hotel and you're the only 1 (sic) I know with the money") has resorted to casual/urgent emails (I've changed my mobile number since the divorce so she can't text or ring me) to try and extort her spending lolly. One beeped into my inbox on Thursday; like a Nigerian princess with £200million but no money to access it. In it, she rambled on about 'need for a holiday, work has cut my hours to 25 a week, can't afford to pay off my credit cards, can't keep approaching my parents, come on! You're loaded and we used to shag' type stuff. I haven't replied. I don't think I can or need to. I'm certainly not 'loaded' if that's the inference. But the overwhelming desire to tell her where to go with a handy map of directions has escaped me. Too soft in my old age. Or perhaps I always have been?
I haven't told Paula. She'd be far more decisive in her tone. She'd probably answer it for me in my absence. This would kill proceedings for a bit, but then again it may instigate legalities. My ex-wife got a nice payout courtesy of the remortgage on my current home from our divorce, but it wasn't nice enough to prevent her moaning about it at the time. Regardless of the fact that I paid the original mortgage off in ten years. Blake hasn't given Paula a penny, despite their decree absolute coming through back in March. She didn't ask for anything. He's now living in Spain with his new partner. He's a fully-fledged builder. It doesn't matter. It's all in the past, dimly remembered, lit in sepia through the aspic.
Tel too is certain, but then he never liked my ex anyway. His pithy retort when I (stupidly) told him on Friday was blunt and cursory and not very nice. I expect a lot of folk react like that. I just wonder why I don't. Perhaps there's something wrong with me?
So we discussed this in a sort of roundabout drunk way, becoming a bit too serious as the topic and the alcohol kicked in and became all encompassing. But he's happier. He mentioned the holiday a bit more and he spoke about Mrs Tel great powers of recovery with something akin to pride and respect, and we went back into the saloon when the wind started blowing a bit breezier and gave us goosebumps and, there, we ordered ribs and more pints and sat gnawing and getting sauce plastered on chins and had to ask for more serviettes and then they took the dishes of bones and bits of tooth-marked gristle away and we exhaled and started on the brandy.
And I thought, yes, he is my superhero. Asked to name my favourite, he'd rank above the Incredible Hulk, Superman and Wonder Woman. He wouldn't beat Batman or Spiderman, but then as a kid I had T-Shirts with them on it. I've never had a T-Shirt with Tel's gurning gob. Perhaps I should? He's more pertinent to my adult self than Batman or Spiderman were to me as a kid. Trouble is, he knows it as well.
Reflective, these off-seasons. Always leaves you wanting more when it gets cold and wet, yet living in it, you can't help but wish for just a little bit of a grey sky and a nice following breeze, perhaps a bit of rain. Only a bit, mind. I've never been a sun worshipper. Too fair. |  |
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