Dog days of summer

5 to 8 August 2015

It was already sticky and uncomfortable when I left for my Wednesday walk to work and, after two short weeks, I was feeling quite sulky and cross at the prospect of four ten hour days ahead.  The sky was a mass of puffy fish scale clouds that seemed one step away from mammatus clouds, those rare upside down   bobbles of cloud hanging downwards where most coulds puff upwards. As I walked I eyed them, hoping they’d change but they didn’t.

The plan had been to walk under the bridge and along the river but I was so busy looking at the sky I crossed the road without thinking and ended up in the desolate park. A sunny yellow evening primrose had sprung up from nowhere, brightening the place a little. Further along, by the demolished TV studios, the viburnum was dripping with red berries, a sign of the waning of the season. These are the dog days of summer. Whether Orion’s Dog Star, Sirius, the originator of the term dog days, is actually rising just before the sun or not, the sultry heat had me throwing off the covers at night and slowed the pace of my walks to a crawl.

By the time I reached the river the cloud had formed an impenetrable layer holding the oppressive heat and moisture in. Putting one foot in front of the other felt like an effort and I was glad to make it to the air conditioned office. It wasn’t long before we all realised it was going to be a difficult week.  The phones were busy right from the start with people asking questions about the Balloon Fiesta in Bristol. Would there be extra buses? Would they have to pay extra if they already had a weekly ticket? Did we think there’d be traffic jams? Then, just after nine, Maryanne, the new CSM, came into the office and told everyone to put their phones on not available. She had an announcement to make.

Of course everyone immediately went into panic mode. Announcements are rarely good, especially when they involve all the phones going off. We sat and looked at each other while the last person hurriedly finished their call.
“I thought you should be the first to know,” she said, “I’ve been offered another job, more the kind of thing I want to do. I shall be leaving in four weeks.”
There was a collective sigh of relief from those of us who’d been convinced the office was going to close followed by a storm of questions. What would happen to us? Who would be in charge? Would the old RCSM be coming back as CSM? What about the recruitment to replace the members of staff who’d left? There were no answers and we went back to work with our heads spinning at yet another change.

At lunchtime I went for a short walk to the shops to get chocolate to cheer everyone up. Since the morning announcement the mood in the office had been morose to say the least. The heat and humidity hit me as soon as I got outside and I wondered if the chocolate would make it back without melting. Every bush along the road seemed to be laden with berries. Branches weighed down with the white orbs of snowberry, rose hips so dark they seemed black, blackberries slowly ripening and droops of elderberries already scavenged by birds didn’t lift my mood much. Autumn is crowding in when we’ve hardly had a summer to speak of.

The layer of insulating cloud was still there as I strolled back home along the river. Crossing the bridge I could see a man, standing on what looked like a home made raft, slowly rowing upstream. For a moment I thought it was some kind of mirage but the more I looked the more certain I was my eyes were not deceiving me. It looked like a strange contraption and, as I meandered along the river path, I watched him, wondering what he was up to.
“Mind the glass,” said a woman in a gauzy flowered kaftan I’d not noticed because I was staring so intently at the water. At first I wondered what she meant and then I saw small squares of broken glass on the path ahead.
“Oh, where did that came from?” I said, not really understanding why I should mind it as the pieces were small, like the glass from a broken car window, and easy to step over.
“Not that glass,” she told me, pointing up towards the flats. The glass up there!”
When I looked up I could see one of the balcony windows was smashed. Most of the glass was still hanging precariously, the glass on the ground was what had already fallen. “What happened?” I asked. “Is it your flat?”
“No, I heard the crash and came out to see what it was. Be careful it doesn’t fall on you as you go underneath.”
With one eye on the balcony a few floors up, I dashed past unscathed, still wondering how it had broken.

By Thursday morning the glass was gone and there was a heavy, thundery feel in the air. Swans and ducks were gathered on the bank by the stones as I passed, one swan noisily pecking at the water. Two trains were slowly passing each other as I struggled along the boardwalk. Even their cautious creeping was faster than my plodding steps. Everything seemed to be going in slow motion, weighed down by the heavy air. Even the swans had a lethargy about them.

All too soon I was in the office and it seemed to be incident day. Calls about incidents where, for one reason or another, a passenger has been injured, are pretty rare but they take a long time to deal with. Obviously we have to get as much information as possible and, if we can, get CCTV downloaded. Within the first two hours of my Thursday shift I’d taken six and I wasn’t the only one, I could hear Sabrina asking the incident questions and Mia. That must be some kind of record.

At times it’s a struggle to keep an open mind or even to understand what has actually happened. Not everyone is totally honest and, even when they are, their stories don’t always ring true or make sense. One of my Thursday morning calls was a case in point.
“I tripped over a paving slab,” the man said. He had a terrible stutter and it was hard to understand him so I thought I might have misheard.
“A paving slab? Did this happen on the bus?”
“Yes.”
“So there was a paving slab on the bus?”
“Yes. It was loose and I fell over it.”
“Are you sure this happened on the bus? There aren’t generally any paving slabs on the bus.”
“Not on the bus, on the pavement when I was running for the bus.”
“If it was on the pavement you need to contact the council.”
“No, it was in the bus station.”
“Were you actually injured?” I asked, not really sure if the bus station was our responsibility or not or even if it had happened in the bus station at all. Even so, I thought I’d better take all the details anyway just in case.
“Yes. I went to hospital the next day.”
“And what did they say?”
“They x rayed my chest.”
“So you hurt your chest?”
“No, my knees. I fell down on my knees. They hurt.”
“Did you break any bones?”
“No.”
“Were your knees cut?”
“No.”
“Have you got any bruises?”
“I might have.”
“But are there any bruises on your knees?”
“No.”
“Do your knees still hurt?”
“No.”
“So you’re not injured?”
“No, but I went to hospital.”
“And they said you weren’t injured?”
“Yes.”
It was obviously going to be one of those days.

In the evening there was a storm of sorts, just a couple of claps of thunder and a flash or two. It seemed to clear the air a little though and there was blue sky and sun for my Friday walk to work. There has been far too little sun this summer in my opinion and far too much stickiness. The wonderful golden light made me wish I didn’t have to go to work. Sunlight, reflected off the water, danced on the graffiti under the bridge and I thought of all the places I could walk.

A white bike was chained to the railings close to the big stones. At six in the morning without a soul in sight I wondred briefly who it belonged to. This seems to be the place for abandoned bikes, a while ago a blue bike was left a little further along. A flotilla of ducks, swans, blue sky, sunlight and clouds reflected in the gently rippled water soon chased all thoughts of the bike away. It was only when I looked at my photos later I even remembered it.

The inevitable Balloon Fiesta traffic dominated the day. In a city that’s basically a traffic jam waiting to happen thousands of extra visitors, shuttle buses and drivers unfamiliar with the route are bound to wreak havoc. Most people were surprisingly understanding, they just wanted to know how long we thought their bus would be. Of course we couldn’t answer. A few were grumpy and some told us about the balloons they could see overhead, making us quite jealous.

The walk home started well. The white bike had disappeared as suddenly as it arrived and the first chenille like flowers were opening on the sumac. More conventional coloured rose hips dangled from the dog roses along the river path and the first prickly pods had appeared on the sweet chestnut near the embankment.  As I approached the viewing platform near the school though I saw something that shattered my sense of calm.

Four lads, probably about ten years old, were pulling branches off the willow tree and lining them up across the road making a strange barricade. Instinct told me to say something, sense told me to walk on by. Instinct won.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I said as I got close enough.
“None of your business,” the tallest lad said, still pulling at branches.
“So what do you think will happen when a car comes along here?” I tried to reason.
“Don’t care,” the lad said, throwing another branch on the pile.
“Come on, move that out of the road before you cause an accident,” I said, still trying reason. One lad, to his credit, did start moving the branches but the other went back to the tree and began tugging at another branch.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” he said defiantly.
“That’s funny because I am telling you what to do,” I was beginning to get angry by this time. Once upon a time young lads up to mischief did what they were told when an adult asked them. The other lads had stopped gathering branches and the compliant one was slowly removing them at this point but Mr Mouthy was still tearing at the tree.
“Don’t take any notice of her,” he said to his friends, “she can’t do nuffink.”
“If you won’t listen to me, perhaps you’ll listen to the police,” I said, getting my phone out of my pocket.
“Now look what you’ve done,” the timid one said, “we’ll get in trouble.”

Although the other boys stopped building their senseless barricade and one looked to be moving the branches from the road the ringleader was busy putting them back and telling the others not to take any notice of me. It was pretty obvious what would happen once I’d disappeared around the corner. As I walked away I did phone the police, feeling a little bad about wasting their time on young lad’s pranks but worried about what would happen after dark. It’s not very well lit along there. The police were understanding and said they’d send a PCSO out. Even so I felt bad, at least for the compliant lad.

The branches were gone the next morning. Obviously a visit from the PCSO did the trick although the poor willow looked sorry for itself. The river was lit by the rising sun as I walked over the bridge and I drank in the peace knowing I was heading for a manic day. On the slope from the boardwalk a sleeping bag lay on the grass. It was empty but it looked as if someone had spent the night under the stars.

Balloon Fiesta traffc was the order of the day. It was, apparently, the busiest event ever and the city was gridlocked. We spent the day tracking buses and explaining why they were late to people who’d obviously been living under a rock for the last few weeks and didn’t know about the balloons. One poor man, who was very understanding, had been waiting for two hours for a bus that should run every hour. He knew what the problem was but wanted to know if we could give him any idea how much longer he’d have to wait.
“It’s three stops away,” I told him once I’d tracked it, ” but it isn’t moving at the moment. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer.”
Half an hour later he called again. The bus still hadn’t arrived. When I tracked it it still hadn’t moved.
“I was going to the Balloon Fiesta,” he said but I think I might just give up and go home.”

Never have I been so glad to follow the badly painted signs along the walkway towards the gate at the end of a day.