Flare

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Sunday the 14th of September, 2014, was unseasonably warm. As per usual August had been a bust and delivered little but warm rain out of a steel grey sky, but September was doing its utmost to make up for it.

I was working from home that day, one of the joys of being a freelance journalist. For months now I’d been putting together an article about humanity, society and the glue that holds it together, having gathered material from dozens of interviews with people involved in the riots a few years before in London. It was, I knew, the piece that was going to get me international recognition, maybe a permanent job with one of the high end magazines and a salary to match.

Pushing my laptop away, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and crossed to the window, trying vainly to open it further.

My tiny square of a back garden below, so lush in the wet August just gone, was beginning to brown like a pie left too long in the oven. The government had declared a heat wave, unheard of in September, but it seemed that every drop of moisture was being squeezed out of the air by the oppressive heat.

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