On the edge of thunder

15 to 18 July 2015

This week was all about humidity and on Wednesday morning that meant  hot and wet. A blanket of thick cloud was doing its best to drop rain but not quite succeeding as I walked through the gloom along the Boardwalk. Colour was provided by spiky purple knapweed and a second flowering of ragwort like a tatty bouquet. Near Horseshoe Bridge a patch of pink toadflax stood out amongst the purple. There was a feel of thunder in the air.

The woeful weather seemed to colour the day and the phones were full of woeful people grumbling, mostly about nothing much. One of our regular screamers was back and up to her usual tricks. She rang with a question about the luggage space on our buses. It wasn’t a question that had a definitive answer because there are lots of different types of bus with different configurations. Poor Skye did her best but the woman harangued her, talked over her, called her an idiot and was generally abusive. I know all this because I had to listen to the call later. Eventually she demanded to speak to a manager. Unfortunately I was on the phone dealing with another customer and when Skye told her this she called her a liar and put the phone down.

Not long after she was back and Terri got her. Within seconds she was screaming at her and wanting to complain about her too. Finally she was put through to me. I did my best to find out why she needed to know so I could help her properly. She lasted about a minute before she started shouting at me and saying she wanted to speak to my manager to complain about me too. This is what she does every time she calls. It’s wearing. She ended the call by telling me she wanted my manger to call her back right away and if she didn’t she was going to call back every ten minutes. As my manger, the new CSM, wasn’t even in the office she was going to be making a lot of calls. Thankfully it was an empty threat.

The threatened storm had never quite materialised but the humidity seemed to have got worse by the time I set off for the walk home. The air seemd thick and wet. It was a slow sticky walk brightened only by the sight of things buzzing around the digger wasp’s nest as I came to the end of the embankment. When I got close enough to see properly there was a dead wasp beside one of the nest holes. Whether this had been trodden on by a passerby or killed by one of the other wasps I couldn’t tell. There was one live wasp hovering around the mouth of the nest hole and, as I watched another poked its head out. Fascinating stuff after such a horrible day.

There was a hint of blue to the sky on Thursday morning and, when I walked through the desolate park, I knew straight away something was different. The lime trees I’d almost had to duck to walk under the day before were suddenly a lot further from the ground. At first I was puzzled, the trunks seemed longer but there was no evidence of cut branches . It was an Alice in Wonderland moment, was I shrinking? Until I came to the last three trees I was convinced I was going mad, then I saw sawn ends where lower branches had been. Someone had been busy and I wasn’t sure I liked it, I’d enjoyed the sensation of leaves gently ruffling my hair and now it was gone.

By the big stones rays of sun were bursting out of clouds that looked as if they’d been painted on the pale blue sky. The swans were all asleep and I felt I should be tiptoeing across the Boardwalk so as not to wake them. The light was perfect bringing out a million shades of green and gold in the swaying grasses highlighted by purple buddleia spikes and buttons of Queen Anne’s lace. Almost hidden in the grass a yellow toadflax surprised me as I passed.

That light made me want to stay forever and, as I came to the slope leading to the bridge, I stopped for one last, longing look back. A cyclist was whizzing towards the bridge and a train speeding the other way. Beneath the blue sky layers of cloud like smudged chalk and charcoal told me rain was probably coming and there was chalk of another kind on the path where children had been drawing. With one last look back through the railings at knapweed seedheads on the bridge, I dragged myself towards the office.

After woeful Wednesday we had terrible Thursday. Perhaps the humidity was making everyone extra irritable or maybe it was us feeling too hot and sticky to be as tolerant as usual. Either way I seemed to spend most of the day dealing with people trying to turn molehills into mountains. It was difficult not to snap back when yet another person raged and ranted because a driver was a little grumpy, the bus too hot, full or slightly late. If I was a driver I’m sure I’d be grumpy too sitting in a boiling Perspex cage being moaned at all day.

Still the thunderstorm did not come and I woke on Friday morning after a night spent tossing and turning in my seemingly airless bedroom. Heavy black clouds hung over the city as I trudged to work and the river was rippled by a wind that brought no respite from the heat but did hold the promise of rain to come. Somewhere above those clouds there must have been sun but it cast very little light. Shortly after I passed under the bridge some rowers came powering up stream. The river had a dull sheen like hammered pewter and a seagul flew so low it seemed its wing tip skimmed the water.

The storm still didn’t break but, inside the office, we had a Twitter storm  protesting about a cut to a service no one appeared to even know existed until that point judging by the number of people who used it. This mainly consisted of rants and annecdotal tales of people who knew people who caught the bus all the time. The fact that approximately four people a week actually did catch it seemed to make no difference. We had an angry mob of Twitts on our hands whose time would have been better spent getting on said bus if they wanted the service saved. C’est la vie I suppose. There’s nothing quite like cutting something to make people notice it was there.

Apparently we’d had a storm of another kind the night before. Everyone was talking about it but somehow I’d missed it. Terri, Mia and Skye were moaning about a mass of flying ants so thick they’d been almost impenetrable. In fact Terri swore she’d swallowed one on her way home from work. Strangely I hadn’t seen a single one although there had been a mass of seagulls flying high over the house during the evening. Maybe the ants missed my village out which is a shame because I like flying ant day.

By the time I left to go home the thick black clouds had morphed into a wide fan of altocumulus almost covering the bright blue. It made for an unusual looking sky and, as I came to the corner by the big stones a woman was pointing her phone skywards taking photos, just like me. It made me smile to think I wasn’t the only one who did things like that.

If anything it was hotter and stickier than ever so my pace varied between slow to plodding. One of the black swans was back, paddling in the shallows quite happily along with all the mute swans. It’s odd that the three of them come and go for no apparent reason and in dribs and drabs. So far this year I’ve only seen two together, whether these are the same two and one is missing or I’ve seen combinations of the three is a mystery as is where they disappear to.

The clouds were gone by Staurday morning, they disappeared overnight without dropping any rain and the blue sky was hazy, the air damp and hot. The tide was out revealing mud and green weed along with the stranded wreck of an old barge as I made my way across the embankment. In contrast to the bright green of the weed covered mud, the grass on the embankment was brown and dry.

On the other side of the bridge the bank was a tangle of grass flowers and Queen Anne’s lace, like a mass of tiny parasols. Along the Boardwalk the first of the blackberries are beginning to ripen. Further on fennel has appeared on the riverbank, umbels of tiny yellow flowers and a haze of fine leaves.

The ragwort on the slope to Horseshoe Bridge was covered in fat tiger striped caterpillars. By the look of them it won’t be long before they pupate and then they will turn into beautiful cinnabar moths, from orange and black to red and black. Ragwort is the preferred food of the cinnabar moth caterpillars, they absorb the toxic compounds in the plant and become toxic themselves, meaning birds don’t care to eat them. Isn’t Mother Nature clever?

The Twitts were still tweeting away about the cut route when I got to work and it wasn’t long before the deluge of lost property calls started. In some ways  Saturday calls are so predictable. Wallets were the most popular item this week, closely followed by phones. One woman had lost a credit card wallet containing her card, bus tickets and a wad of cash, we didn’t hold out much hope of that turning up. Why are people so careless with their stuff?

In Bristol, the Harbour Festival was causing traffic chaos and delays of up to an hour on most bus routes. Every other call began with “where’s my bus?” Most of the callers weren’t impressed by the delays and were pretty vocal about it. Ironically some of them were even going to the festival, causing all the problems. On top of that there were calls about the diversions in Southampton for Sunday’s Sky Ride. When I left at Five I felt a little guilty knowing Mia, Skye and Terri were going to be dealing with the fall out for two more hours.

The morning’s cinnabar caterpillars seemed to have started a bug trend. There were ladybirds getting a little frisky on a hogweed seedhead by Horseshoe Bridge. Taking a photo seemed a little voyeuristic if I’m honest. On the Boardwalk the buddleia was doing what buddleia does, attracting bees, the flowers were alive with them.

By the big stones the fluffy seedheads on the knapweed looked like angora pom-poms or a bunch of powder brushes. Then I saw the black swan on the corner. A man and little girl were throwing bread and the swans were lumbering up the shingle. Seeing the black swan on the land, side by side with the mute swans, emphasised the differences. Aside from the obvious the black swans are far smaller, their necks are longer and thinner and they don’t have the knob at the top of their bills. The black swan’s wing feathers are curled and ruffled plus they’re not quite as black as you might think, each has a lighter greyish edge. They also have white flight feathers although they’re mostly hidden.

The final bugs of the week were, of course, the digger wasps on the embankment. they seem to like the hot sticky afternoons. I can’t say I feel the same. It felt as if the city had been on the edge of thunder all week but somehow the storm never did break.