Endless summer nights

Summer is a tiring, tiring time. It's mid-May, and already the sun is up until 9 in the evening. It's working hard, rising at close to 5 in the morning. After winter, I'm not sure what is worse, short hours of daylight or long ones. The long hours of daylight has the effect of making one wake early and go to bed late.

You somehow just feel rather silly having dinner when it looks outside to be like 5 in the evening, except that it's closer to 8, and falling asleep when the sun's barely set. I miss the hours of night when it looks as late as it really should be.

I used to like it when I last lived here. I guess somehow as you become older and your body clock gets used to working as it has been for the accumulating number of years it has always worked this way, the body starts becoming less adaptable to things like weather, time zones, travel.

I'm beginning to feel an inevitability of time, when things start to catch up on you, when you start to realize that you may be running but you're only running in circles. It's that sense of deja vu, that "I've seen this corner before" feeling.

Six years ago, it wasn't warm in April or May. Six years ago, you didn't feel ill travelling on the plane, wishing it would be your last. Six years ago, the temperature in the UK, even on the warmest nights, never reached 30 degrees celcius. Six years ago, people spoke about the weather in an Oscar Wildean way, just saying, not doing anything about it. They weren't even talking about doing something about it.

And suddenly, comes 2007, the year where the bets are stacking for a 40 degree summer in a country where air conditioning was never a necessity before. I used to like living here, having migrated here to avoid the pollution, humidity and bad air in Singapore. But I'm beginning to think however, that there's nowhere too far to go now.