It was the full moon last night and I worked till fairly late and then the GF had a late meeting. After I finished work I finished the book I’d been reading, Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. It’s very well regarded, but I didn’t like it particularly. I thought it far, far too long and the sustained high pitch irritated me instead of sweeping me with in. There were at least four different endings, and I wished it had taken the first. And I found some of the final scenes as various characters came to understand each other enraging rather than touching.
After the GF’s call finished, we went down to the beach for a short while, as the moon was full. It was too early still for it to shine directly over the creek, which is to the west of us, but it was fiercely bright with clouds scurrying over it, turning it on and off like a great but slightly defective spotlight in the sky. We saw something glittering and went over to investigate – it was a foil wrapper, looking magical in the light.
Earlier in the evening we’d gone to see the sunset – my last, as I have a meeting at sunset today – and been rewarded by a giant red orb peeping out between the clouds and otherwise invisible hills. We had taken with us a bottle of the fresh palm wine, which was about the strength of beer, and I felt rather furtive carrying about a plastic mineral water bottle filled with cloudy hooch. We drank it at one of the quietest spots, the sort where there is a blanket of silence in the air, even when broken by the sound of waves and, of greatest interest to us, of mudskippers flapping over the water from exposed rocks to mangrove roots. Amusingly out of character for us two, to take our bottle of illicit down to the beach to chase after mudskippers.