Sometimes I don’t want to understand her

Today I walked out of the pouring rain into the post office where the song Summer Holiday was playing. At first it made me smile, in spite of myself – “we’re going where the sun shines brightly”, since in this city it hardly seems to ever stop raining. But as I stood in that queue while the guy in front of me debated football with the clerks behind the counter and took his sweet time doing whatever the hell it was he had to do I realised something. It wasn’t the radio I was hearing, instead the song was on a damned loop. The same song was playing over and over and over. How the three members of staff in the post office didn’t go insane I don’t know. They probably already had, and that’s why a Cliff Richard song was playing endlessly.

For some reason, I can smell the coast today. This city is miles from anywhere, let alone miles from the coast, but the torrential downpours all day must have come from the ocean. I would not have been altogether surprised to have seen the occasional fish or frog in the puddles – why the city council can’t fit drains that can cope with the constant fucking rain I don’t know. It was probably cheaper to put in small drains and some man with a big cigar and a pot belly gives himself another payrise. The whole world’s coming to an end, I swear.

If Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday wasn’t bad enough, the person who lives next door to me and whose bedroom wall apparently shares mine was also playing the same song on repeat – I don’t know the artist or the title, but I know that it involved repeating the words fuck you endlessly. I stood against the wall and called myself using my mobile. It made me smile as I heard his stereo’s high-pitched whine from the interference block out the music.

And here we are, another day. It rains, it floods, another ambulance screams past on its way to somewhere or another. Someone tonight will probably get stabbed to death in an argument about who is the best football player on the same team. I can’t say I feel all that terrible about the idea.