Five miles, down the mountainside in the fetid sink of a trapped valley where it gets hot as sin and no breeze stirs, there is a town.
If you were to travel through a time warp, perhaps be sucked through a blackhole, you’d believe you’d arrived in 1964.
Shops lean one on the another, heat sizzles on the wide, uneven pavements. In the oval a wooden stadium casts a shadow over two black cannons from the Great War. The whack of leather on willow echoes under a sky where blue never ends.
A 24-hour McDonalds oversees it all. It arrived in 1998, in a truck, and was assembled inside 36 hours. Apparently that’s a record.
It doesn’t matter what time you drive by, it’s packed with corpulent SUVs, sound systems doof-doofing, waiting in line in the Drive-Through lane, V8s throbbing like a heart.
Any early morning you drive from our house, down the mountain, the fresh cool breeze sifting through your open window, enlivening you with scent of jasmin, eucalyptus, fangipania, you’ll see McDonald wrappers strewn about; boxes, empty drinks cartons rolling from the verge, sometimes the wind sending them skittering like silly animals, under your tyres where they pop.
The other day, I saw a field of cows the colour of butter scotch, standing knee deep in a field of the greenest grass.
One of them had its nose in a MacDonalds box.
He chewed.
The silk breeze made the grass flow like the sea.