![]() Practically we don’t need to use our senses anymore…”” It’s like everything has drown into this grey nothingness. “We are living in a constant bubble of smog where it doesn’t matter anymore what you drink or eat, whether it stinks or not. “ “The cities have lost their smells,” says a resident of Amazon-3. Once back to colours and silence I traded my Pripyat for a surfboard. It took me almost two weeks to pack all my books and stuff. Their contributions were to create the uncontrollable monster of Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, and The Vampire, precursor of Dracula. That missing summer, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and Jhon Polidori, met each other in Switzerland, beside lake Geneva where, confined indoors by the bad weather, they passed their time playing games and writing scary stories by the fireside. The terrible lack of oats to feed animals and especially horses inspired Karl Drais, a German inventor, to research a new way of transportation : the velocipede ( the first bicycle). Fragmental volcanic materials in the atmosphere led to spectacular, mesmerizing sunsets, colors never seen before appeared in the sky, and painters like William Turner were unconsciously influenced in the choice of tints and shades. Crops failed, famine and disease spread – and great poets and composers of the day responded with works of gloomy genius. Clouds from a huge volcano plunged the world into endless winter. I wondered if there had ever been a year without a summer. They called it “the year without a winter”. The immediate damage was considerable, flooding, loss of electricity, structural failures. As soon as the temperature had returned to the seasonal average, suddenly the buzz stopped. ![]() Then on March 20th, a bolt from the blue. I didn’t return to the office even when my case on biodegradable chips was reopened. slowly, and with unexpected, grace people returned communication. ![]() On cooler days I took advantage of the more human decibels to read the last chapters of all those books I had never finished.įebruary gave us a break, the wait was replaced by organisation and mobilisation. ![]() Everything became slow, temporary and postponed. Sometimes I thought about the south of France and cicadas. There was no noise other than the fans, uncoordinated and persistent. There were no other smells but those of moist and ionized air. On hotter days my headache exploded, I stayed lying on my back for hours looking at the ceiling. I spent almost an hour at the window picturing the building in front of mine : #Sergio Leone #Civil War #Christmas In The Far West #Clint #A Fistful of Dollars #family time #no filter #like for like, then I fell asleep, exhausted, before sunset. I drank two or three liters of vodka and lemon sorbet, I tasted just a bite of turkey. Since Natural Christmas trees and light decorations had been banned, my mother just put a beautiful red tablecloth on the table. On December 8th the state of national emergency had been declared.Ĭhristmas was the longest day ever recorded. At work, production fell by 45 percent and every provision was postponed to a date to be defined. Like many others, I was spending my days wondering why I’d come back to the city. I started thinking differently about those nights, with a sense of regret. In November the temperatures were still 10 degrees above the seasonal averages. From time to time just the breaths of a couple making love in the dark, on the sand. Never had the chance to approach them.Įvery night around midnight I zipped the tent. Wonderful! Colourful! Powerful! I was camping in the wild, right behind the official surf camp where people were young and beautiful, blond, tonic, smiling and tanned. I had pushed myself (in fact I literally pushed my car) to reach the ocean. Thinking about my journey, it was a special one, maybe even a little nostalgic, but beautiful and international. It could be dangerous, my glasses weren’t polarized. At 9pm on September 14th, the sun was setting on the horizon and I checked, as scheduled, the last point of my summer program: “remember to take the East road with the sun behind you”. I always think about my future.Ī month later, my town was exactly as I had left it. It was not a family inheritance but rather a typical nostalgic caprice, something that frequently happens to people in their thirties, a smart investment that after ten years would have yielded up to four hundred percent of profits, much more than any bank deposit or pension fund. I had decided to leave alone for the summer holidays that year, it would have been the last journey of my old orange Pripyat, a Soviet-style three-door car, produced until 1972 at the Kommunor plant, today in Ukraine.
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