Flamborough: Week 14 – 31 July

It’s been a week bookended by explosions and drifting clouds of smoke. To start at the end, last night was the finish of gala week, which always culminates in a very pretty firework display down by the river. For once the weather was kind and sunset elided into a clear night of soft blue skies, against which the dark shapes of birds flitted to their nests, the perfect stillness of the night broken only by the pounding thump-thump-thump of the funfair. We watched the fireworks from our upstairs window, breathing in the drifting smoke from the huge bonfire, watching coloured flashes fill the sky and jumping at the bangs. The only problem is, it’s practically August, and here in the far north of Scotland summer tends to leave with the fair. Autumn is just around the corner: the wind has a subtle edge and even the warmest days have a feeling of impermanence.

Getting ready for the bonfire

The week opened with the demise of our microwave oven, which yielded up its spirit accompanied by a loud buzzing noise, like a bluebottle trapped in Metallica’s sound system, together with a cloud of acrid smoke. It occurred to me that this might be a special feature by the manufacturers, if they were Scandinavian, and that each oven departs this world by providing its own Viking funeral; I suppose I should be grateful that it didn’t ritually disembowel and incinerate me as well.

I’ve been amusing myself by imagining how various writers might have described it. So far I’ve got Dickens (“It was the best of ovens, it was the worst of ovens”), Tolstoy (“All working microwaves are alike; each broken microwave is broken in its own way”), Jane Austen (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an archivist in possession of a broken microwave, must be in want of a replacement”) and Tolkien (“In a hole in a recycling bin lived a broken microwave”). Then there’s Camus: “Our microwave oven died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” Or possibly even Kafka—”As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a broken microwave oven”.

So now it’s off to the home for abandoned microwaves to find a new one, always a depressing experience as you walk up and down rows of cages, with hopeful ovens wagging their little tails and barking optimistically, hoping you’ll take it home. I just hope the new one’s been housetrained. Meanwhile I can only make this appeal, in the immortal words of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ovens…”