nineteenth july
number twenty-four
mehrunnisa, at home
we are back from alassio, a small beach town with a large personality that sits along the italian riviera. the long and soft curve of sandy beach was busy throughout the day. this holds true even on the first two days when the waters roughened by the mistral were really a series of strong waves. brief furrows of cloud visited the skies with slim pickings of rain. they cleared fairly quickly and were not strong enough to stop us relaxing on the beach and cooling ourselves in the salty water when our skin got hot. covid altered the meaning of waves and it took returning to the ocean to remember the majesty and beauty of them. sometimes rowdy and rough and high enough to ride. at others, soft and gentle with a splash of foam. i love the sensation of the tide pulling the sand from under my feet, firmly planting them.
we had planned for a few days of doing nothing but got way more than we had bargained for. there was the afternoon where i got stuck in the bathroom and had to be rescued by the hotel handyman. this involved the good old fashioned method of throwing his weight at the door since the handle has disassociated from the latch. omair had a near brush with a jellyfish. and just when we thought he had gotten lucky he ended up needing to see a doctor on account of an ear infection and blockage. the visit to the doctor turned out to be much more of a wild goose chase than we had hoped. the hotel spa had a doctor but was prevented from treating guests because of covid. so they suggested going to the emergency department at the local hospital in albenga which was a fifteen minute drive. when we got there, the vacancy and silence of the car park foretold its lack of operation. we walked into a cavernous and very empty waiting area. a nurse in scrubs was on her phone and the only other person was a guard at the front desk. he spoke as much english as i do italian. despite our limitations we established that we needed to drive over to a larger town in the commune. he scribbled the name of the hospital on a post it in crooked capital letters.
i called my friend ilaria who has family in turin for help. she explained that hospitals in smaller towns were closed because of covid and that we would be better off contacting the 118 helpline. by this point, omair had decided that the matters of the stomach were more urgent than the ear and so the search for the doctor was paused until the next morning. we went to la crocetta in the hills above alassio. needless to say, it was a fraught dinner. i was worried about omair and he (rightly) told me off for not having learnt how to drive. it would be pretty accurate to say that we ate our feelings. there was a pesto with ravioli, spaghetti with tomatoes, fillet steak and potatoes and incredibly sweet peaches tossed with lemon and crunchy sugar.
the next morning i found a local clinic that accepts walk-ins. we walked into the waiting room where the ticketing system was in abeyance leaving patients to work out their place in the queue. omair spent most of the time worrying about not being seen by noon, which is when the clinic closed and fretting about getting sick from being in a place with other patients. the handful of people there were masked but there was a lady who had a bad case of sniffles. the wait was over an hour but eventually omair was seen by a petite female general practitioner with an empathetic personality. omair had typed up an explanation of his situation into google translate which recited his english input in Italian. this prompted an examination of both ears, with exclamations of ‘perfetta’ for the unaffected one and ‘no perfetta’ for the other. she then produced a syringe the length of her forearm. i was a little alarmed but omair, who has had ear issues in his childhood, was cool as a cucumber and said that she understood exactly what was needed. the syringe was used to irrigate his ear. it was a clunky operation. the syringe was too big and the general practitioner kept saying her hands were too small. i could see that she was using her body to get it moving so i offered to help hold a kidney shaped bowl to omair’s neck to catch the saline solution. it took a while but eventually omair said that felt better. the treatment also included a short course of antibiotics to help with the infection and some ear drops. we walked back to the hotel, trying to keep the shade in the midday heat stopping at the pharmacy along the way. we had some lunch after which omair napped in the bedroom and i spent a last and solo afternoon at the beach.
we were sad to leave that sunday. in this part of italy, everything had felt remarkably like pre-pandemic times. the shops and restaurants were brimming with people. we walked through crowds outdoors with only the slightest of hesitation. it was wonderful to walk amidst strangers and to eat in restaurants to a soundtrack of loud and happy conversation.
things of note in the department of edible things: sweet, ice-cold wedges of watermelon handed out on the beach, frothy cold coffee, roughly torn pieces of warm farinata (a chickpea flour flatbread shallow fried in olive oil), large heaps of fried seafood, focaccia di recco (a rather fragile pastry with a centre of stracchino), cuttlefish pasta with octopus and the most delicious courgette matchsticks.
things to remember: it is freedom day in england. a nation within a nation that has chosen, in the name of libertarianism, to abandon all pandemic related public health measures; how pre-pandemic level normal alassio was; the joy of strangers.
things to forget: exhaustion, how hard it is to hold all of ourselves at one time in one space, trying too hard.
Jenny, at home
Notes on a pandemic heatwave. It’s all our apocalyptic dreams come true at once. Catastrophic flooding has been engulfing continental Europe (and now China) while we bake in river-drying heat. Here, where it is usually cooler, breezier and much rainier, there is a sort of dazed wonderment about it.
There have been hot summers before – at least one scorcher in particular lurks in the memory of every generation – but not, since records began anyway, like this. One day, the hottest place was on the coast, and that can’t be right.
The extremes are exactly what climate change science has been warning everyone about for years, but the accuracy of the predictions is still shocking.
Lives have been lost already: people are drowning in this drought, and it is dangerous in other ways. But, away from those terrible scenes, there is a reality-suspended holiday feeling. I think it’s especially weird over here, so seldom seen as the place to be. Here we are, though, and how do we look? Amazing.
But there’s no escape from the pandemic. I think about how this stretch of it will be remembered and how much of it will be forgotten, whether “Freedom day” or the freak weather. I used my freedom here to go the cinema again – twice – to see a neglected piece of history brought to life.
TheSummer of Soul was the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. It was the same summer as the moon landing and Woodstock, both of which, I belatedly realise, should be seen in proper social context and not in their own historical bubbles. When I saw the (terrific)
Apollo 11, I thought I’d some sort of insight into what else was happening at the time because there was footage of people watching the news, but really I had no idea.
Summer of Soul is full of contemporary insight into racial injustice and the fight for civil rights. That some of the commentary could be about Black Lives Matter is the film’s indictment of society. The film’s incredibly generous gift to a virus-ridden world is a showcase of the intersecting geniuses of the performing artists, the festival organisers and supporters and the community of Harlem over the weekends of another hot summer over half a century ago.
Things to remember: Summer of Soul (both times), a new running route, more swimming
Things to forget: hay fever (except next March, when it’s time to remember to start taking antihistamines) and that’s it – remember how everything else was, because it’s important