September tends to come as a relief. Finally, after almost three months holiday the children return to school. Or as a neighbour put it, "the grand-parents can breathe again." As so many parents work children are ferried from relatives to relatives in an effort to keep them busy, or for the very little ones, find someone who can take care of them. Thus a far from unusual sight in the parks in summer is an elderly man or woman pushing a stroller or over-seeing some toddlers at play.
But September also means a return to normal schedules. All shops are open, most people are back at work and in the second week the kids return to school. Everything starts up again.
Waiting for the bus on my first day of work, I noted how after the summer nothing had really changed: the bus shelter smelled of piss, discarded garments littered the pavement, the gutter was full of (already) autumnal leaves, and the bus was taking an age to pass.
By the end of the day, an end-of-summer storm, a burst of wind and rain, had temporarily cooled down temperatures .The accumulation of leaves and rubbish in the gutters had helped to flood some of the city's major arteries and closed down parts of the underground. A weekend later a repeat performance caused identical damage with the mayor of the city blaming the trees for the flooding. Nobody it seems pointed out to her that were the streets and sewers regularly cleaned flooding was avoidable. On the postive side, the threatened water rationing never happened. Two summer storms were enough to push off the rationing to another day.
September means work again, it means schedules again, it means life parceled off into hours. It's a long haul 'til the next holidays!
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