Written at 'The Mug House'

I'd forgotten how beautiful home is.

England is sitting under a heatwave at the moment, an honest-to-God, Met-office-are-issuing-warnings and people-are-sweating-like-foreigners heatwave. This means two things, that there are hosepipe bans spreading through the country like SARS at a chicken-fucker's convention and that the countryside around Worcester looks glorious. I'm serious, this is like some postcard from Ruscany or some other area where media types practically come all over the television, the camera, themselves and the audience in an effort to communicate just how lovely a particular village where the only recreation is fucking goats is.

The pallet of the countryside at the moment is brown, gold and green. You can tell everything that needs to be watered because it's all turned brown, anything that is ready to be harvested is gold and anything with decent roots is green.

This means you have a green hedgerow, no doubt inhabited by cuddly middle-class characters, and, you know, feral foxes, surrounding crops.

On the M25, gold, green and indeed any other colour gave way to black and, briefly, red, as the fire brigade turned up to extinguish the roadside. I knew about this because I was sitting in the fucking tailback while they did it.

I've come home for a week.

And it is beautiful. Not just because it looks so great, and it does, with the green and the gold and the brown and the blue blue blue of the sky with a multi-coloured hot-air balloon hanging, motionless, suspended above the earth.

And wouldn't that be a fucker, in this present heat I could imagine that a balloon may well stay up forever, defying all attempts to bring it back down to earth. Can you imagine that, being stuck up in an enormous picnic basket and running out of food? You'd basically be looking to see what steeple or chimney you could reasonably snag yourself on, and also which of the other people in the basket were the most succulent looking.

It smells like home too. You can smell the fruits and vegetables in the fields. It's so hot they don't need polytunnels at the moment and you can smell the strawberries and the raspberries and you can smell the onions and you can smell, Jesus Christ you can smell, the sheep and the cattle and the silage that the farmer has been spraying. It smells great. Intense. Don't think you could have it wafting round in an office though.

You can certainly smell the hot earth. This is beyond baked dust, this is baked fields, this is a vegetable bake on an acre-by-acre scale. This is the smell of hot metal, of sprayers and of diesel cooking under the hot sun and of course of foreign pickers getting hotter than they ever did in their accession country markets.
All that is right and holy and true: a pint and a packet of pork scratchings. God, they were fantastic.

Is there anything that goes so well together as a packet of pork scratchings and a pint? I felt so good that afterwards I thought we could solve the whole middle east problem if they just sat down with a big bowl of pork scratchings and a few pints. Mind you, when i were a lad, the pork scratching had bristles on them - now they were real pork scratchings.