Gone To Ground

I think I'm meant to be in tomal lockdown at the moment. I feel like I've been in a hellish heat tunnel after last week's heatwave.
horror
horror
horror

the *minimum* temperature was 30 degrees some nights. I kid you not.
we shut up the Love palace like a little hot cave, covering all the windows in wet towels and took the computer out of the study where we could smell burning plastic.Each morning, we filled the bathtub and the fridge full of cold water as each afternoon the cold tap released SCALDING HOT water

the last time I'd been exposed to anyting over 40 degrees was in MAdrid in 1998. I went mad, and skulked in the basement of the Prado, staring at goya's 'black paintings' doing obsessive scrathcy graphite transcriptions.

remembering spain, I decided to adopt a similar strategy. Each day, after soaking myself and my clothes in the bathtup, I skulked across the road to the tram, caught the tram to Flemington Road, scuttled along royal Parade and hid in melbourne uni library each day.....madly reading randoms bits of Australian art history, obsessively checking my footnotes, and rechecking, and rearranging my chapter and slowly going mad.... and just mindlessly gorging my eyeballs on words, trying to forget where I was, when I was, where i am now.... so damn close and so damn far, and really hating everything.

At 6pm, as the library shut I'd curse the furnace of heat as it hit my lips and baked my eyeballs and scuttle back to the tram, come home, scowl and sulk at Renaissance girl, and curse the city...

note to self: must spend next January in Northern Hemisphere