This piece has been sitting in my iWriter like cheese in a fridge. Not a good idea.
So I am posting it to be done with it.
Might wash my hands now...
'I have been ranting about August today in a blasphemous way.
What are the months? I felt them like there is a potentate who presides over each. A goddess of August. We are subject to her whims of weather, her emotional outbursts. In human form, she would be a large, blowsy woman, a bit lazy and prone to leaving things where they fall. I daren't look too hard in case she notices my attention and demands my head.
It has always been a difficult month for me: Well, perhaps it was endless heaven when I was young, so that 'always' means since I had a working domain.
August is the Month of Interference.
I used to fish an open boat off a shingle beach. When it was beached, safe above the tidal reach and anticipated seas, it attracted a keen, intrusive interest in August.
I would often leave the boat smeared with the detritus of lobstering, partly from tiredness, but also hoping that its rank, fishy smell might deter tourist curiosity. An August morning would often find its deck littered with lager cans and pebbles.
At sea, lobster pot ropes hung slack on the surface, prone to being cut by speedboat propellers, where curious visitors had lifted them.
It is an aimless month. In some European countries they wisely take the entire month off: declaring a Great Emptiness.
Of course that means ice-cream vendors and deckchair attendants are in full cry.
The painful truth is that this coastal economy generally is dependent on visitors. Well, it is heaven, so who are we to clutch it to our chests?
The winter is a peaceful desert though. The `Ber dynasty hold court there at first before the two `Ys supplant them. Both decree a more essential pace to things. A war economy. I like this.
August is an emotional month too. Laden with fruit and fat rainclouds, ready to burst. Drunken wasps, drowned butterflies.
We would all be poorer without the arrival of any season.
August though is the final,decadent crescendo of the Empire of Summer, the month of Visitor onslaught.
The Finale is August Bank Holiday: like the end of the crescendo in "Day in the Life" on Sargeant Pepper.
Psychic and physical Relief.
Before the empty spaces blossom in the car park.
And the tumbleweeds of Autumn roll down down Market Street.'
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