Keeping In, Keeping Out

On heat, lemongrass, and poetry

The weather today reminds me of the weather in July three years ago when temperatures reached forty degrees. I can’t imagine it much hotter than it feels today, but it was.

Like then, I’ve spent the day holed up in my flat with the blinds down, trying to keep the warm air and the sun out. It’s dark and womby in here – and still very warm – but it feels safer than ‘out there’, where the sun is burning the tarmac and there isn’t enough shade to get from A to B.

I keep thinking about what I’m keeping out. It isn’t really the sun or the heat, but what they represent, and what I know is coming. I keep the radio on low but catch snippets of the news about the heatwaves in Europe.

I’ve been diffusing lemongrass oil all day – a smell I love, and the use of which is meant to dispel anxiety, bring clarity, keep negative thoughts at bay. Mainly it’s working, but you can’t keep everything out.

I met online with a colleague and despaired together about the slow unravelling of higher education. I met with a mature student who is writing a seemingly epic memoir about his life and his family, surviving Partition in India, migrating, settling, living.

At the end of the meeting he told me how urgent his project felt to him.

‘I honestly think it’s the end of the world,’ he said. ‘From a Marxist perspective, all the conditions are in place for a third world war.’

Afterwards, I stood over the diffuser, inhaling lemongrass.

Aside from those meetings, I’ve spent the whole day with someone’s poetry manuscript – reading, suggesting edits, commenting. Reading other people’s poems (especially when they’re good) is like opening a magic door – or many magic doors… you enter the mind, the space, something of the heart. It’s sometimes hard work, but a privilege too.

This is what I’m thinking of, lying in my lemongrassy, womby flat. I haven’t left home all day, but seem to have been everywhere.