31 degrees today and the heat doesn’t seem to be dissipating into the night. It’s cooler outside but the front room keeps the heat. I didn’t open the shutters or the curtains in the bedroom today and consequently, it’s cooler in there but this room is still hot. I can’t bring myself to bring all the shutters down, close the windows or draw the curtains as if I’m in some nuclear bunker. I’d rather suffer with the blue sky visual, beautiful, cloudless, like the inside of a strange blue creature, inhabiting the arc of its skull. I imagined that we are microscopic and living inside an entity that is also microscopic to the entity that it also lives inside, and so on and so on forever.

Back on Earth, the Marquês market was on today, its last appearance till September, August seems to be closing time in Portugal unless you are a tourist spot where you reap literally while the sun shines. I haven’t had the chance to get down into town yet to see how tourist crazy it is down there but I’ve heard it’s nuts. I’m not sure that the tourists know about this market at the top of town. The awful DJ was on form today playing a daylight afternoon medley of fifties Rock ’n’ Roll followed by Frank Sinatra’s My Kind Of Town (1964) and then a Michael Bublé song before he returned to his usual unfathomable inappropriate seventies disco, I left hearing Ra Ra Rasputin (1978). Even when he’s eclectic, it’s all wrong, but then if I were playing Van der Graaf Generator followed by Television and Captain Beefheart, probably more people would complain. I’m presuming of course that anybody actually really notices what music is playing. Is nobody stopping to listen? It’s just background, loud background that nobody clocks. I always do, it doesn’t matter where I am, in a lift or a mall or a cafe, I always notice the music, even if it’s quiet.

I bought a nice African ornament of a lounging bejewelled figure and picked up seven more old Wire magazines for the archive. I decided to go to the other psychedelic psupermarket for something so boring I’m not even going to tell you what it was. When I got there I bought a whole lot of things I didn’t know I needed and on my way home tried to find my way into shady parts of the street. I was actually waiting for the Community Shield game to start. Last year’s league winners Man City versus last year’s FA Cup winners, Liverpool. Both teams showcasing their new star players. Alexander-Arnold, Salah and Núñez scored for Liverpool and Álvarez for Man City.

Olivia is back late tonight. If you want to see her behind-the-scenes video from the festival you can see it here:

 
She’ll be coming home to summer after winter in Australia. It was a bit weird going to Australia at the beginning of June and although it was wet, it’s still Australia. What was the hardest to handle was suddenly going back to it being dark at 5.30 after having gone through winter here and welcoming back the lighter evenings. In the old days, I never saw the winter, I was always in Europe or America in summer and then in Australia…in summer.

Music today has been Badfinger’s Straight Up, released in 1971 in the USA and for some reason 1972 in the UK on Apple Records. It’s full of great songs including the hits Baby Blue, produced by Todd Rundgren (No.14 in the US) and Day After Day, produced by George Harrison (No.4 in the US, No.10 in the UK). What a great album.

Music Of The Daze