Like most old-style apartment blocks in Taipei, built around thirty years ago, mine has a sort of balcony at the back, where the washing machine sits, and where one hangs out clothes to dry. The balcony is covered by a plastic roof, which means that rain creates an almighty row when it pours down, as it often does here. The roof is a natural amplifier: the rain sounds much heavier than it feels against the skin. If I concentrate, I can pick out the sounds of individual raindrops smacking against the plastic. It springs to mind that as a child of six or seven, I made a hobby of watching individual raindrops trickle down the window pane of the bus that took us to our swimming lessons. I would pretend that they were racing their friends, the other raindrops, to get to the bottom.
Tonight I realised that I have got a long way to go, still, in terms of getting better.
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Sunday, 26 June 2011
a storm in the night market
The blunt roll of the thunder above. Like boulders being crumbled between giant fingers a few worlds away.
For once I remembered to pack an umbrella in my backpack, but I choose not to take it out this time. The caffeine has begun to prickle in my blood, and I decide to walk a loop of the night market while the spring of the storm pulls itself taught. Dark spots are multiplying on my grey trousers. People hurry past me beneath umbrellas, talking into their mobile phones about heading home now, have you seen the rain! I turn a corner: the neon lights of the night market--only just switched on for the late-afternoon browsers--glow even more obnoxiously in the pre-storm gloaming. I pass by rows of hairclips in the primary colours, dangling necklaces hung with charms of owls and horses and stars, flimsy dresses with micro-floral patterns. A man making pancakes in what looks like a giant cast-iron toastie-maker. Shop owners standing in the threshold, scowling upwards at the sky.
A girl selling orange juice emits a kittenish squeak, "nee-ow," as I rush past her stall. The rain is really coming down now. The light is even dimmer. I turn onto a back street and the sky twitches twice with lightning. I remember how I would crawl into bed with my parents as a six year-old, terrified of storms, and how my father taught me to count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. One elephant, two elephants, three elephants, four elephants. Boom. Four elephants! The storm is four miles away. We lay there in the dark, tracing the storm as it approached our house. Three elephants. Two. Cowering under the duvet, the pictures in my head were of an early nineties videogame: evil clouds with malevolent little faces moving across the sky in search of the house where the most scared child in the village lived. At one elephant, I braced myself and allowed the physiology of fear to take over, waiting for the two-three-four-five elephants to drain the adrenaline from my blood.
Today, I count again. Two elephants. Two miles. I walk faster. But I am so relieved that the storm has come to find me.
I realise that this is what I crave at the moment. Events on a massive scale: storms that swallow entire cities, the sight and sound of a hundred thousand people singing the same song (where the streets have no name) at a festival in rural England, a map of the world. Anything that allows me to zoom out. The other direction is too frightening.
For once I remembered to pack an umbrella in my backpack, but I choose not to take it out this time. The caffeine has begun to prickle in my blood, and I decide to walk a loop of the night market while the spring of the storm pulls itself taught. Dark spots are multiplying on my grey trousers. People hurry past me beneath umbrellas, talking into their mobile phones about heading home now, have you seen the rain! I turn a corner: the neon lights of the night market--only just switched on for the late-afternoon browsers--glow even more obnoxiously in the pre-storm gloaming. I pass by rows of hairclips in the primary colours, dangling necklaces hung with charms of owls and horses and stars, flimsy dresses with micro-floral patterns. A man making pancakes in what looks like a giant cast-iron toastie-maker. Shop owners standing in the threshold, scowling upwards at the sky.
A girl selling orange juice emits a kittenish squeak, "nee-ow," as I rush past her stall. The rain is really coming down now. The light is even dimmer. I turn onto a back street and the sky twitches twice with lightning. I remember how I would crawl into bed with my parents as a six year-old, terrified of storms, and how my father taught me to count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. One elephant, two elephants, three elephants, four elephants. Boom. Four elephants! The storm is four miles away. We lay there in the dark, tracing the storm as it approached our house. Three elephants. Two. Cowering under the duvet, the pictures in my head were of an early nineties videogame: evil clouds with malevolent little faces moving across the sky in search of the house where the most scared child in the village lived. At one elephant, I braced myself and allowed the physiology of fear to take over, waiting for the two-three-four-five elephants to drain the adrenaline from my blood.
Today, I count again. Two elephants. Two miles. I walk faster. But I am so relieved that the storm has come to find me.
I realise that this is what I crave at the moment. Events on a massive scale: storms that swallow entire cities, the sight and sound of a hundred thousand people singing the same song (where the streets have no name) at a festival in rural England, a map of the world. Anything that allows me to zoom out. The other direction is too frightening.
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