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That Summer

I have no particular hit single for that summer, no miracle century of Botham's to remember it by - only the heatwave, July long past its sell-by date, but still going on inexorably with its flies and flea-bites, and the city turned into Abroad by the tourists. (Why, I wanted to know, do the foreign girls not shave their armpits as they shave their legs, or, conversely, let their shins grow mossy and strokable as fawns'?) But the abiding image is of me, well past midnight again, adopting a reclining position on the doorstep, my arm angled up through the cat-flap like a despairing goalie's to the lock from which you have thoughtfully extracted the only key to the cottage.

Simon Rae

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