Summer in the city. An acquired, sticky sort of taste. At least my windows open this year - last year, as you may remember, the landlord had helpfully painted them shut, so we sweltered in stuffy rooms throughout the heatwave, relying on one rather tired fan to circulate the warm air back around the room. Not very conducive to sleep at all.

In contrast, this year, with windows wide open, we get the full benefit of not just living on a relatively quiet street (to be fair, last year, even if we had been able to open the windows, we’d only have ended up shutting them at night because we lived on the busiest road in the north of the city, pretty much) but also listening in on all the neighbourly ambient noises from the houses which back on to ours, and those adjacent.

Modems dialling up, fridges buzzing, arguments, barbeques, parties, people making love (the girl downstairs is a real screamer) and the mad old bat who lives in what must be an institution of some kind, in the basement of the house that backs onto ours, who spends many long hours over lunchtimes sitting in the back garden with a cup of tea, having incredibly loud shouted conversations with some unseen person indoors. We can peer down through the leaves, three storeys below, and see the top of her head, but are unable, alas, to aim projectiles into her tea (perhaps a biscuit with the word “shush!” written on it in permanent marker?), because of the bush in the way. Ah well. Perhaps when winter comes?

All sounds very cosmopolitan, doesn’t it? Very New-York-hot-in-the-city slowly-turning-fans people-dripping-with-sweat framed-in-dark-windows and lone-saxophonist-on-the-rooftop, eh? (Actually, on reflection, that sounds more like a lemonade commercial or the start of a bad eighties porn flick. Sorry)

The truth is that as I type some twat is letting off fireworks in the very narrow space between the back of the terrace on our street, and the one behind, and I’m so paranoid that one’s going to come in through the window (not by accident; on purpose.

Teenagers around here would do that kind of thing, just like the teenagers in Liverpool who once through a mountain of snowballs through a window I’d left open when I went to a lecture. I came back two hours later to find my bed covered in melting slush. My bedroom, let the record show, was on the fourth floor, and the window was open six inches. Those kids could go far in cricket, I tell you….) that I’m going to have to go and shut all the windows at the back of the house.

We’ll swelter in a stuffy room tonight - it’ll be just like old times…