Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

First couple of club outings in a couple of years. Didn't last long at either -two hours or so. But it was good to see friends I hadn't seen for over two years, catch up, dance.

I'm still wary of enclosed places full of people. At this age and having gone through major surgery in recent months I probably am more at risk than many of the people I know. Still, I'm already at risk going to those schools, particularly the one in Highbury. With due precaution might as well live my life a little.

One of the many irritating things about this shared-ownership thing was (is!) the fact that it classifies me automatically as riff-raff, in terms of rights as an owner and as a tenant. I wasn't allowed to use the main entrance to the building (it was built with two, one for the 'private owners' or their tenants, on Fortess Road, another much smaller and more basic looking one for the shared ownership leaseholders and the housing association tenants, at the back). I wasn't allowed to use the roof terrace. These things have slowly changed and now I have use of both. The underlying problems with having a flat on shared ownership haven't gone away (already received a service charge bill where I'm going to be paying something like £260/month for not a lot at all) but at least I get to go to the terrace roof and take pictures of the breathtaking sunset cityscape of London from up there.

Some of those pictures in my Instagram. at https://www.instagram.com/flaviomatani/

Ah, a sunny morning at last. Funny how my mood changes up or down with the weather. In the beginning when I first came to the UK I used to laugh at the 10 min long (as I saw them) weather forecasts on TV. Coming from a part on the north of South America on the Caribbean (but away from Hurricane Alley) our weather forecasts told you it was going to be sunny or it was going to rain... and that was pretty much it.

Here the weather is more variable and there is a winter (although my friends from Russia or Canada might dispute this), with long periods of short days with grey skies and not seeing the sun for weeks on end. This affects me far more than the cold. After our little mini-summer of a week or two ago, yesterday's 4 º C, battleship grey skies and ice-cold rain seemed to make a difficult teaching day so much worse. Today just looking out the window made me feel much better about the day to come.

Last night the air-conditioner box (one of those where you have to put an exhaust hose out the window) woke me up when it started spluttering and throwing hot air instead of cold. Well, I suppose that would be the day when it happened. I'd bought it soon after I moved into this flat, five years ago, at the hardware shop at the corner that then became a café then an Indian restaurant then another café and finally now a hairdresser's, so I suppose it paid its due, for those perhaps two weeks in the year when it's useful or necessary. But useful it was, on those admittedly very infrequent occasions in such a grey, wet, cold island as this normally is.

It wasn't that yesterday! It was difficult to work in the heat but it didn't actually feel to me as bad as on similar occasions in previous years. I don't have to go in the tube at peak hours, so at least I don't have to put myself through that, with people reporting 45º in some lines yesterday.

Come November I may miss this... no, actually, no I won't, or I won't miss the hottest days, at any rate. I like the summer, I'm a little more awake (or less dozy) than at other times, I feel that the things I do (guitar practice in particular) work more smoothly and productive. For a child of the tropics, though, it may be odd that I don't like the heat. Anything above about 25º begins to be a bit uncomfortable and above 30 or so it becomes really uncomfortable. I do whinge a lot, don't I.