Zephyr

On our old footy ovals down in the South these February winds of late might have been judged worth five or six goals. Captains tossed the coin and the winner decided in which direction their team would kick. Coming "straight down the guts" of Geylang Road the strategy would have been long bombs to Chaddy in the square; Tony Gaggino was another big marking target — when those lads were available. Chaddy often missed with illness, with failure to get a lift from Sunshine and late in the season cricket commitments. (Like another of our lads, Chaddy would go onto high-level district cricket, sharing partnerships with big retired international names and on one occasion telling of a former Australian captain bowling up to a woman in the social club and, in the Australian version of celebrity gumption, asking her straight-out for a fuck.) Conventional wisdom was you always took the wind if you had the opportunity; later it might die off or rain arrive. For a captain schooled by old Bab that went against the grain. One did not leap to easy offerings: put in the hard yards first, dig deep and put on the squeeze, then in the second quarter after you had achieved something you could cruise. Catching the pill in the wind was tricky for sky-jumpers, the big blow making judgment difficult and also disturbing one's equilibrium and rhythm. A leather rocketing in the wind was almost as bad as a slippery ball in the wet. The last couple of weeks the sky galleons have been sailing the empyrean here afternoons and early evenings, when usually they stood as if painted onto the heavens. Hanging out the washing from the bathroom window required not only a second hanger to tighten the play on the brass fastener; better also a bulldog clip to further limit movement. With some colour in the clouds the drama of dusk through supper was turned up a notch and when the other evening the call to prayer came on over somebody's radio the whole stage was elevated to another plane. (At the former Labu Labi one of the workers always turned up the call shortly after 7pm, a captivating moment in that phase of slow darkening that first gathered in the pavement trees.) Currently the bura, bora from the Alps would be belting down on the Montenegrin coast and up in the interior around Belgrade one would need to keep one's mouth clamped tight against the cold. Invariably due easterly at ground level in lower Geylang here, whereas at the heights the cloud movement suggested northerly. Almost entirely absent through this period, some heat creeping on today. The remainder of the year there was not the merest stir of air—another of the deprivations one wanted to blame on the PAP. Forest greenery would have made up for that lack.