I am 4 weeks without a cigarette. I really wanted one last night, but it's too hot to smoke, and anyways I'm living in the ice cream freezer at Supervalu for the duration of this heatwave.

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After a friend posts on FB about Asian himbos in TV and film, I dream about Henry Golding and I wake up thinking I need to tell my friend I had met Henry Golding and then I think, “Hey, wait a minute…”

In the dream, Henry Golding wants to buy a weird contraption of inexplicable function from Dad and I am ringing Dad to tell him, but he isn't answering the phone, and when I remember he is dead, I wake up.

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Over the weekend in-laws visited. It was our last or penultimate weekend of freedom, before the pub re-opens. I just wanted to lie in bed, reading and daydreaming, drinking coffee and eating cherries and generally not thinking about much. Summer innit?

Summer is languid heat, shimmery beaches, panting dogs, bug bites, ice cream on walks to the woods. But summer is also flash floods, mass dyings, wildfire sweeping across moors, bogs, and scrubland. Thousands of flamingo fledglings perished in a Turkish lake depleted by drought. While reading about ammonites in Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, I recalled the ammonite fossils I had examined in the paleontology museum across from our hotel in Rethymno, which had been converted from an abandoned mosque. Millions and millions of years old, perfect whorls laid out neatly under the glass. All those flamingo bones, Anthropocene relics for another, more conscientious civilisation to puzzle over in the far distant future.

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