SUNSETS

I’ve always been a sucker for a good sunset. I suppose pretty much everybody is. It’s one of the stock images of human contentment, even though there are some miserabilists who consider it a bit hackneyed or kitschy. Probably my own enthusiasm has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up in the 1960s and am thus a hopeless romantic idealist. Plus I spent my formative years in a small village in the middle of nowhere in the days when TV, if it existed at all, was in black’n’white, and we depended on things like fires and sunsets for colour in our little rustic lives.

I’ve also had the good fortune to spend various stages of my life in places which are in the west and near water, which is a big boost to us sunset fans. Liverpool, where I spent not only a good few but more than a few good years, is a great place for them; it’s that combination of a coastal setting, a westward vista, and the Gulf Stream, or so people tell me. Izmir, on the west coast of Turkey, is another big port where I hung my hat for a while, and I have many happy memories of sitting outside my favourite watering-hole on the seafront there, a nice cool Efes beer and a plate of meze (toothsome snacks that are just fine and dandy when consumed together with said cool Efes beer) to hand, gazing dreamily out across the bay as the evening breeze brought merciful relief after a baking hot day.

But surely the most spectacular sunsets of my life were when I lived in El Geteina, a town on the east bank of the White Nile in Sudan; I used to go down to the river, which is very wide there, and watch this enormous red African sun falling into the water so fast you could actually see it moving. Because it’s equatorial, the difference between the times it set in the summer and winter wasn’t that great, which was weird and wonderful for a European who was used to the huge differences we get here.

Not that I’m complaining. Here in Central Europe (not Eastern – calling this country Eastern Europe is up there with dissing their beer as a really effective way of upsetting Czechs in record time) we are blessed with some splendid examples, too. They can be a bit watery in winter, but in summer they can be pretty spectacular, and on a nice evening there is nothing that my plague of mosquitoes and I like quite so much as sitting in my garden and watching the sun go down over the forest.