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Summer ’92: second wettest of the century.  Three summers on, I register internal disbelief.  In next to no time, it seems, I have coloured in a whole season with the memory of a few hot dry weeks.  Yet certainly, for those weeks it hadn’t been the weather for going anywhere.  There’d been the usual water shortages – only worse, and motorway tailbacks that resembled nothing so much as wheeled casseroles queuing up for the inferno.  Sanity would have been a deckchair in the shade listening to the rainstick-tinkling swirl of crushed ice in a tall glass.  But for some time then I’d been planning ‘grand tours’ – a leisurely visiting of places, old friends, and new acquaintances.  In particular, I’d been looking forward to visiting ‘long time no see’ faces from university years – years when there’d seemed prospects of doing something academic myself; only things hadn’t turned out that way.  Recently I’d come back full circle to just a good hard spit away from where I’d started out. 
 
One late June evening, a few thirsty plants got extra water rations.  Next morning – up with the postman, I was driving fast out of Birmingham – windows up, foot down – till signposts began mentioning the names of places I’d never been to. 

                            sharing a closed car 
                            with a few flying insects – 
                            zzZip – Have a nice day

Swindon: Olympus of extinct gods (1) that had me dimlit platform gazing upwards awe-struck at hunk-nosed solid Zeusian power – immaculate green and gold immensities – flame-illuminated, pungent and terrible; not just the lonely compulsion with names and numbers, but the magical – only the magical could prickle-ice my spine like that.  Childhood’s imagination. 

                            acrid hot steel tang –
                            and I’m back: capped and satchelled,
                            40, 50 years 

I thought perhaps there’d be a sign: Railway Museum.  But I didn’t look too hard: Swindon in the swelter of a summer’s afternoon was no Adlestrop – just another urban sprawl, nudging the Marlboro’ Downs – coming from the north, a town of sudden steep inclines and confusing carousels of new-think roundabouts.  I descended unannounced on Kevin Bailey (2) , and this occasioned the bringing out of much-needed refreshment.  Slumped in deckchairs in his small back-garden, we watched the sky go through its colour-charts and rattled poetry about until it was time for me to leave.  But as I drove on south, I tallied the air with a moistened finger, and Swindon obediently disappeared from the screen (3)

                              home-made lemonade;
                              but tired, hot toddler
                              doesn't care for haiku talk