A Long Way from Italy

In ten days or so I will be halfway through my summer of June, July and August; the summer barely seems to have started and yet I have been in shorts and light shirts for some days now, my usual early summer insecurity about shorts long forgotten.

A seasonal awareness is about small things.  Choosing bathroom tiles we found ourselves on a Hereford trading estate on a blazing hot day, in a stuffy warehouse full of repro tiles.  But we also found a few boxes of genuine stone tiles, travertine and marble, pale slices of an Italian hillside; they looked like thick slices of bone.  The dust rubbed itself into my finger, this Italian road-dust, the ivory/cream fabric of the country itself.  And then, a five-minute dash into the supermarket for supplies and I brushed against some struggling basil plants in the reduced box; and in the middle of a hot afternoon and a busy shop the thick smell of basil was suddenly, briefly, everywhere; then it was gone.