Of heatwaves ...

Ok , today we joined in. Can't really call it a heatwave for us, not after only one day, but I will concede that today was simply a lovely summer's day and is ending on such a still, warm evening that I can hear the distant pulsing of a ship's engines on the Firth as it heads out to sea. I started my day with the last Pilates class until after our teacher's summer break; the studio windows were wide open and my mat cunningly placed just in front of one of them, so it wasn't till the last set of exercises that I began to feel ... hot. I drove home, made my coffee, and sat in the garden with it, thinking about ... heatwaves.

And this is what I called to mind: blobs of tar, glistening and sticky, melting between the cobbles at the edge of Glasgow streets in the heat of the sun. Do we not have tar on roads any more? Does it no longer melt? There does seem to have been a melted runway today somewhere ... And I remember too the summer of 1955, when it rained on the first two days of our summer holiday on Arran - the first two days of July - so that my father went out and bought his first ever pair of waterproof overtrousers. And then it didn't rain again the whole time we were there, all eight weeks of a schoolteacher's summer holidays back then. I remember not seeing Goatfell for weeks, hidden as it was in a heat haze, and day after day spent on the beach, going into the sea over and over again instead of huddling in all our clothes with chattering teeth after a swim. And I remember the summer of 1975, the first we spent in the house I'm still living in, being glad we were no longer in the council house we'd started in because it got so hot indoors, being glad that I wasn't pregnant because I'd end up lying like a beached whale in my friend's garden ...

Actually this afternoon was just perfect, perfect enough to make me think I might swim in the sea, though when I tried an experimental paddle the combination of cold water (because this was really the first hot day) and the onshore breeze put me off and we had a brief, pottering walk by the shore instead.

I took the photo of the sky after dinner, when I popped back out to the garden to do today's Italian practice in the coolth. I think it's rather gorgeous.