Strawberry
A short note on summer sentimentality.
The tinny guitar line of Strawberry Swing is in my headphones. The Boston heat is heavy - a high-tog duvet smothering us.
The CD of ‘Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends’ by Coldplay was one of six that could be loaded into the black magazine of my mother’s Peugeot 206. Unlike today, this meant that we would listen to certain albums - again and again. Hearing the line ‘now the sky could be blue, I don’t mind, without you it’s a waste of time’ as I walk to the office takes me immediately back to the passenger seat of the 206.
It’s the end of summer. British September when the verges are green and full of cowslips. I’m being driven to school. I’m 13. I’m excited. I’m starting afresh - striking out on my own. I can sense her sadness embedded in her happiness. Odd how humans can parallel process so effectively.
I’m in the office adding the song to a playlist. I’m walking to the coffee machine and I remember an image in the first show that I took to the Edinburgh Fringe. The line was something like ‘blood sticky like strawberry jam’. That week in Edinburgh was the start of a yearly pilgrimage. A week when we could play at being adults, when we were theatre professionals for a minute, before September returned.
Strawberries were clearly on the mind. A few days earlier in this heatwave, I had a picnic with a friend on the bank of the River Charles.
It reminded me of a quote from Brideshead Revisited:
“At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade.
On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine – as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together – and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.””
Strawberries and Turkish Tobacco. A sense of an ending, a deep sense of foreboding tragedy, is experienced in these lines describing a moment of apparent bliss. Summer is like that.
Summer leads to September. Deep neural academic programming returns us to ‘serious work’ away from the play roles we have inhabited.