A SLICE OF SUMMER AS DARKNESS FALLS

That time of year is upon us, the time when you look out of the office window in the middle of the afternoon and it’s already going dark, and you’ve got very little to look forward to but four long months of heading home in a combination of any or all of ice, rain, snow, fog, cold and darkness, with the prospect of getting up in the dark the following morning and heading right back again through much the same conditions. Alternatively, if you’re at home, it can seem to take forever for the day to feel like it’s properly begun and before you’ve had time to get anything done, it seems like it’s already over and the darkness is already creeping back into the skies with the inevitable gloom-inducing black clouds making the skies seem, if possible, even darker.

Once the darkness falls, you can head out into the world wearing way too many layers, or occasionally too few, and you get the sense that you can never quite get it right, so you’re either sweating buckets or shivering and freezing in the darkness, and you start to feel an empathy for your ancient ancestors when that race memory starts to surface that is only natural, a survival instinct: Fear of the dark.

In those long-ago times when we all huddled together in our caves fearing the coming of the creeping unknown, any hostile foe that could creep up on you unawares and pounce out of the shadows and spirit you away forever. To protect ourselves we would form little terrified pockets of humanity, family units and allies standing together against the unseen terrors in the night and the unknowable blackness. That’s when civilisation started to happen; Looking out for one another, banding together against a common foe or a predator, sharing out the food until the long days of spring made us feel safe again, and discovering and utilising fire to keep the cold and the dark away from us, at a safe distance, beyond the edge of the night.

In modern times those fears remain with us. Even in our own homes, we can still be terrified by an unexpected noise or a strange shadow or the creak of a stair or when a familiar object assumes an unfamiliar shape in the semi-awakened state we sometimes find ourselves in during the smallest hours, when we are plunged into the half-darkness despite being tucked up in our safe little kingdoms. Our imaginations can run riot due to a sudden draught, an unexpected thud as a badly placed coat just falls off its hook, an animal crosses the lawn, a drunk heads home after a late night, or when a passing headlight lights up the room and a shape is formed and looms over you like so many killers in so many films. We might jump in fright, then laugh at ourselves for being so silly, but our senses are on full alert with the needs of fight or flight and sleep and safety can then seem very far away.

Even before you sleep, the senses can be tingling. The mysterious shapes and shadows made through the frosted glass when a neighbour raps on the door to hand over that parcel they signed for in the sweetly remembered daylight, making an act of kindness suddenly seem utterly menacing, or the sudden unexpected banging on another door when the milkman or the window cleaner comes calling for his payment. Who is it? What to they want? You approach the door cautiously, tentatively as you try to return your racing heartbeats to something resembling normality, one eye to the spyglass, as you’re busily fitting the security chain.

“Oh! It’s only you. You nearly frightened me to death!”

But not this time, oh no. He didn’t get you this time… Tonight it’s not the ghastly, ghostly figure with the scythe coming to call on you, tonight it’s not the fourth horseman guiding one of his apprentices, tonight you do not open the door to greet the maniac with the hammer, the fiend with the axe or the hoodlum with the gun, but just the frighteners lurking on the insides of the mind, those fears you harbour of the possibilities and the maybes, and the jitters that make your soul shudder when you consider the “what ifs?”

Not today.

Thank you.

THANK YOU!

When we venture outside, the fearful images from the imagination can become even worse. The orange glow of the streetlights, the mist, the rain, and the reflections of the houselights in the many puddles can turn the most familiar street into the most threatening of environments. Who are those sinister, shapeless figures behind you, or ahead of you, or surrounding you? Would anyone hear you cry out if they suddenly decided to come and get you? Would anyone come to your aid? Or find you afterwards? What would they find, and would your broken body just terrify them instead? That person following you - those footfalls behind you in the shadows - you’re suddenly so sure that they might be following you with the most hostile intent, even though they’ve probably just walked calmly and unnoticed behind you from the station on many a previous summer’s evening. Those dark corners that you’d never really paid much heed to until now, now suddenly seem like they could hide a thousand perils. Those cars with their beaming headlamps that blind you at a vital moment, when fate reaches out and grabs you, and their misted glass that renders you invisible and vulnerable in that dark “power” suit you wore so confidently during those precious few hours of daylight when you felt invincible, but which now feels insubstantial against the worst the world can throw at you.

Summer can suddenly seem such a very long time ago, just a fading memory of happier days. Can it really be only two months since we were enjoying the slate grey skies and tippling rainfall of the Autumn Bank Holiday? Those long gone evenings when we sat outdoors with the arrogant confidence of the light shining onto us, fully able to recognise the familiar faces or assess those of strangers from a safe and well-lit distance, or even just staying indoors, watching our televisions as we wasted the precious light when the evening stayed bright well past eight o’clock in the evening. Back then the darkness was contained, its threat subdued, but not any more, endless night has fallen here and it’s forever until the break of dawn.

I spend a lot of the winter thinking about and looking forward to those long warm summer’s evenings and how I’m going to make the most of them, and then summer comes around and I waste them with endless little pointless bits of stuff to do that keeps me away from just sitting out there and soaking it all in. Could this be what they meant when they said: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”?

On a balmy summer’s day, there’s nothing we like better than to sit outside our own ramshackle little castle watching the flowers and the bees and sometimes we’ll try to take their picture. I don’t take the best pictures of such things in our household, that honour goes elsewhere. Sadly, I can only share one of mine with you, but after all this talk of darkness, perhaps its best to end with something you’ll hopefully enjoy, a fragment of that beautiful daylight that we all take so much for granted, and just a little reminder of a tiny slice of summer on this damp and depressing day…