If only we choose to raise our eyes, so many of us can look up to an unmarked sky. How long will this last, the second truly blue summer of our lives, and will I live to see another?
A surreal moment from the first, when the world stopped, will stay with me. I’d stepped outside, phone in hand, and pointed it above my head, pivoting slowly on my heels to record the pristine blue over the rooftops, over the limes, the sycamores, willows and cherry. No raggedy off-white ribbons, messy cross-hatching or blurred bands of a false front. Heaven had healed the scars, scores and slashes of aircraft vapour trails. Week after week we were blessed with the sunniest, bluest, purest skies we had ever known.
A year later, I’m standing on the high footbridge over the river, girdled by water meadows full of ruminating cows, looking up and witnessing the morning’s weather unwrapping. I want to mark this period before the low rumble of high thunder, the human traffic that begins again with a lift-off from Stansted or Luton. I want to at least half-remember a time I wish never to forget.
Down below, I can feel the damp soaking my trainer-clad feet. To the north, the purple clouds are carrying away the unwept remains of that pre-daylight shower. Low on the eastern horizon, a narrow cloudless bank of pink glows, the remainder of a dawn passed. Shafts of god rays suddenly break through a chink, maybe 100 metres above. To the left, a ripple effect, like tide marks left on shale sand. And swivelling right, more shaping, a herringbone pattern that half-fills the southern sky. Unusually, it is from the west that puffy optimism comes, billowing white clouds edge closer with grey wisps and backed by the lightest sky blue.
I have read the minutes in nimbus, cumulus and cirrus, untainted by “aerostratus”: the residual trails of planes, discharging as dirty meteors. And then comes the air traffic – a skein of six Canada geese passing overhead. They leave nothing in their wake.
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