Windy

I like it now with the wind blowing through the house, through open doors and windows, slamming them shut before someone has time to close it. I couldn’t sleep in the heat. The heat which gets all the more trapped in red brick houses, felt like being in a stone oven. I tried to sleep naked on the cold wooden floor, but the floorboards just heated up from my body temperature. I opened the door to the back garden and drowsed on the white pleather sofa, but a mosquito came screeching in my ear, so I slapped my head and went back to bed.

 

Today the wind is whipping everything about. Watching out of the garden door as the red tree on the left-hand side meets branches with the tall bamboo grasses on the right-hand side. Swaying like they’re drunk and shaking their leaves off. I had to prop up the tomato plants, which have shot up and tried to grow too many fruits. The ambition of all of Annina’s tomato plants she left in our care is hard to contend with, but I’ll do my best to help them along. I pruned their boisterous bottom branches and used twine to hold their necks up on sticks. I had to pull three snails off our flowerpots – both impressed and grossed out by their sucker-strength.

 

We have gained a new housemate and a spider recently. The spider (whom I have named Serafina) hovers above the kitchen stairwell and has her web in the window, which is finely constructed and equally distributed across the pane. She sits in the middle of it waiting for prey, but every time I’ve passed her abode, I’ve not seen any flies or insects caught in her net, but on my side of the house at the top of the stairs there are loads of midges. I wonder if she’s made a fool’s choice building it out there, but we shall see.

 

I open the double-doors to my bedroom (purpose built to be a sitting room) and the wind rushes past, scattering papers across my desk. It’s so breezy and blustery in here, like being on the prow of a ship – a Post-it stuck to my ugly work monitor flapping like a sail. I unfurl my sleeping-bag onto the floor and lie down, listening to the whooshes of the wind outside.

 

There is an enormous bush outside my bedroom window, which is very noisy – for a bush. A flutter of sparrows descend onto it every day and chirrup for ages, like a full theatre audience chattering loudly amongst themselves. At night, usually after midnight a family of foxes eat take-away under the bush, ripping open treated cardboard and crunching through discarded chicken bones, falafels and chips. Occasionally a group of people hang out in front of the bush, between 2-3am with drinks. I overhear everything they’re saying, as if we were in conversation because they don’t realise that the bush they’re cotching in front of is actually hiding my open bedroom window. I’ve heard of scandals about stolen money and loved ones who’ve moved away. It’s sad come to think of it and lying awake I’ve wished that I were dreaming and not hearing the real life tales of strangers in a bind.

 

The gusts of wind continue to rock my boat/sleeping-bag, gently from side to side, drifting me off to sleep.

Parallel Parking

For the first time in my life I am learning to drive. It is very difficult, but I’ve already had more than six lessons and I’ve passed the Theory Test, so you have to take your Driving Test within two years of doing that. I am actually paying for the privilege of putting my nerves through strenuous exercise every Saturday morning, I murmur to myself as I tie up my laces at the bottom of the stairs, so best get on with it. My driving instructor, John, is a hero. Pushing down on his brake pads when I’m about to slowly crash in to the stationary car in front. Or swerving my steering wheel as I narrowly escape clipping the white van parked by the side of the road. When I stutter and stall in the middle of Lewisham junction, almost every time we go through there, he fends off the angry drivers with a wave of his hand and gives me clear and quiet instructions on how to fix this problem.

I am concentrating so hard on driving that my neck and upper shoulders are permanently tense, and when I go down bends on a road, it feels like when you're strapped inside a rollercoaster by one of those over the shoulder safety mechanisms, only releasing and letting you breathe when the ride’s over. I’m not a natural driver, but then I never imagined I would be. I have rarely sat in a car during my growing up years, my parents didn’t own one and I rode around on mini-buses at school, quite far back from the driver. John says, ‘People usually pick up little rules of the road paying attention to their parents, or whoever’s driving them around.’ Even when I’m in a car I don’t pay attention to what the driver is doing. I'm always staring out the window at the other people and the colour of shopfronts! Or something equally un-drivey.

Today we do a new route to Blackheath and I find myself doing exactly that and staring out at things instead of concentrating on the driving. It’s because I used to come here when I was at school. The heath looks so different when you’re driving around it. It looks smooth and manageable, but I know underfoot it feels rough and takes an age to walk over. The No. 54 bus crosses my path and I remember that’s how I used to get home. We follow the one-way system as plump pedestrians walk out in front of parked cars (hazard!) and I wait at the traffic lights, with the clutch pressed firmly half down, trying to hover for John.

Once we’re on a quiet residential street I have to practice my parallel parking. I don’t understand parallel parking. Conceptually and rationally, yes I understand parallel parking, but in practice of having to make the car I am in control of do it, I cannot fathom how. Because you have to turn your steering wheel right in many different angles or degrees (John tries to make me understand by drawing and explaining laboriously, pouring out his care and due diligence trying to make me see), but when you put your vehicle in reverse you have to steer in the opposite direction. It hurts my head and tortured neck looking out the back window trying to understand it. For now, I will just do exactly as John tells me to and one day I hope that I will get past this.

As I’m doing this painfully slow reversing and neck craning, I see all shades of life through the multiple windows and mirrors. A Royal Mail van is parked up quite close. The postman opens his red double doors and is shuffling through letters and packages, then stuffing the ones that fit inside his courier bag slung low below his hip. A funny looking family come ambling down the pavement towards me, a grandma wearing an oversized sweatshirt with NAVY stamped on the chest, a little girl, and a grandad wearing baggy khaki clothes, walking boots, and an enormous neon yellow bucket hat with a floppy rim. Reminding me of those stereotypical Australian hats, with the bits of cork hanging off string. He also has a little leather pouch. Now a second postman comes out from a side street and crosses the road behind me, making his way to the parked van. I must wait. Next time I look through the windshield I see the two postmen having a natter, I wonder if they’re on eachothers’ turf? Next time I look out of my rear window, I see the grandad smoking a pipe sat on a low garden wall, still in his hi-vis hat but no longer with the kid.

Looking from a car out in to the world is a very strange perspective. It’s like a moving room. Usually the view stays pretty much the same from a window of a room, apart from the change of seasons, or maybe if you live somewhere without light pollution, the stars will sometimes look different. But in a car you can study people in the outside world, with no real offence taken. You can even say stuff about strangers who are only a few metres away from you, without being heard or harassed. I guess I’m describing some of the grounds for road rage, but I feel no rage, only nerves and wonder.