Dog Days

How inexpressibly doleful I found that scene - the stifling heat, the harsh light, the empty streets, the lifeless cinema, the old film, the disfigured wall, the forlorn weeds. As I stood there, I imagined someone actually entering the Ritz and I experienced a strange conflict of feelings. On the one hand, a dog-day instinct told me that an escape from the open streets, heat-cowed and sullen, into cooler
surroundings, such as that cinema could offer, might be welcome. On the other hand, another instinct that old one not to shut oneself away on summer's day, told me that such an incarceration was against nature: the thought of someone steeping himself in the gloom of the auditorium in the middle
of a sun-drenched afternoon, even one like this, was melancholy enough initself; it was made doubly so by knowing that the film was utterly lacking in the appeal of a new release, was stale and irrelevant; and trebly so by knowing that the cinema would be almost deserted and that the few people sitting in
there would have to be, according to my intolerant young lights,saddos to have chosen to be in such a place in such weather at such atime of day for such a film (how difficult it was to imagine any of them setting out from home, walking through the airless, burning streets, entering the silent foyer, buying a
ticket, for that of all ends!); yes, it was a thought so desolating I found it barely supportable.

There was something else too. As I stood there - and indeed as so often when marooned on an isle of dog days - I was troubled by a more aching visitation of that feeling which had first stirred within me
years before, on those sweltering July days at Kingsdon St Mary primary school when, as I
listened to Olivia reading The Wind in the Willows to the class, I gazed out of thewindow at the empty, heat-distorted playground. Strangely, it seemed now, that feeling, to have something in it of what I had previously associated only with certain scenes of cold, not heat: the old unease.