It actually smells like autumn. Well, fuck me. Thanks for making it easy to quit you, Europe, going fucking autumn in early August, you frigid bitch. I'm really starting to feel like the hapless half of a relationship, in a sort of situation where Europe has been passively-agressively forcing me to break up with her because she doesn't have the balls to dump me herself, by, for example, revoking Brits' rights to live and work in the Schengen area, or by learning English so that she can do my job herself. Well, fuck you too, you evil cow, I'm going to go spend the rest of my life banging your much hotter daughter Australia.
All of which is a way to say I can bear the atrocious summer, one of the worst summers I've passed in Belgium, weather-wise, though the competition from 2009, 2008 and 2007 was all pretty stiff (motherfuck, I've been here awhile), because it doesn't matter, since I won't have to bear the winter. With that in mind, I quite like that it smells like autumn - that it smells like that clean and vigourous natural scrubdown after the sharp rain. I wish I could bottle that essence as a perfume; there must be a way, because surely it must be a thing I'm smelling when I think I'm smelling the clean - must be some sort of mushroom that actually manages to smell like clean. Right? I don't know.
But it's almost like sniffing an emotion of transcending hope and joy and I'll miss it awfully if I can't have it any more in the Antipodes. But the F-word says I can still smell it in Australia because it's not actually autumn I'm smelling, it's the post-rain, and they will have rather a lot where we are going; lots of cracking great thunderstorms. Probably it'll be even sharper and sweeter, since the breaking of the heat by the rain will be far more dramatic.
Oh good lord, it's just occurred to me that I have no idea what it's going to smell like there. I was already getting dizzy with anticipation just thinking about what the birds and the fruit is going to be like there. Goodness gracious me.
2 commenti:
That first paragraph is the finest extended metaphor for the capriciousness of Northern Europe's fucking stupid weather I have ever read. Thank you.
Putting my scientist hat on for a moment, that wonderful post-storm smell is mainly ozone, produced by ionisation of the air by lightning, with a smaller contribution from bacterial spores being pushed out of the earth by the rain, and probably some other shit too. It's a fantastic smell, I quite agree, although there are some people who aren't so keen and think it smells like hammers.
You're welcome! Ozone, bacteria and spores, eh? I bet they'll have those in Australia, lucky for me. Now I'm going to go sniff a hammer and see if that was a simile for disliking the smell so much it's like getting hit in the face with a hammer, or if hammers actually smell like autumn.
Posta un commento