My flight landed in London Heathrow in the afternoon. I must be the last one out of the plane as I completely lost myself watching out of the plane window: The sky was blue, could you believe that? And there was white cloud as well decorating the sky. They seemed so low that I might even touch them if I could jump high enough. I felt like being in a movie. How incredible!
In my memory, the sky was always kind of blue/grey on a good day, yellow on a bad day or just completely disappeared on a really bad day. And I was partially to blame for it. Till I was 15, I lived in the outer part of the city and my schools were never far from the farms. During each Autumn, We watched the farmers burning the straws in the fields with excitement. They yellow smoke they created would rise to the sky, spread out and cover the whole area include the school campus. You wondered whether you were still on earth or on another planet, or whether some monsters would step out of the cloud the next moment as in the TV Classic: A journey to the West. But after school, a few of us would run over to join the farmers. We competed in setting the largest fire and creating the thickest smoke. Some even went as far as throwing in their school books and papers into the fire.
Later on, when my family moved to somewhere more urban, we became neighbour to a cigarette factory. Initially I thought it was weird to have such a factory in the middle of the city till I realized that the place used to be the outer part of the city not too long ago. The speed of urbanization was too just fast. While we lost the chance of playing with fire in the fields, we got to keep the yellow smoke thanks to the factory. In contrasts to the farmers, the factory produced its smoke, a light yellow kind, with remarkable consistency throughout the year. Irrespective of the time of the year or even the time of the day, I knew I was nearly home once I entered the area and smelt the smoke’s unique favour. How welcoming.
Despite moving away from the farmers, we didn’t escape from the seasonal variances. The sand storm in the spring and autumn seemed to get stronger every year. The news reported they were coming from inland area going towards the sea. They were not holding a beach party, were they? In the winter, smog started to develop as well supposedly as people burned fuel and woods to stay warm. I imagined such need was always there, but why was the problem getting worse? Was it due to the increasing population in the city? I never figured out. But it was quite an inconvenience when the whole city was covered in the black fog and you could not see the next building out of your window. When the monster actually stepped out of it, one would not have enough time to escape.
When my high school made a poster about itself, there was no surprise really that it had to Photoshop in the blue sky, white cloud and the cute pigeons. It would otherwise look too similar to the Necropolis buildings in the game Heroes of Might and Magic III. I had always thought it was just done out of pure imagination. Now, sitting in a plane at Heathrow, I was glad to see such places actually existed on this planet. Well, at least I got to play with fire.