"SKYBRUSH DRIFTWOOD"

Billy Squirrel and Susie Squirrel got married, because they were crazy in love and it felt like the right thing to do. As their friends clapped them out of the little squirrel church in the woods, Billy and Susie skipped off, paw in paw, into the bright spring sunshine. As early-afternoon sunbeams sparkled off flower petals, the little squirrels too seemed to radiate a spreading circle of light, warmth and joy everywhere they went.

But as Billy and Susie gambolled carefreely through a screen of lush and verdant ferns, they inexplicably found themselves emerging at the other side into the middle of the testing hangar of an industrial jet-engine factory. The wood was nowhere to be seen, and the grimy windows blocked out the sunlight, leaving the interior of the factory mostly illuminated by the flames of a gigantic smelting furnace.

Soot-blackened, perspiration-soaked workers toiled away amidst the hellish noise of the massive propulsion engines and the roar of the furnace, but the scene made no apparent impression on Billy and Susie, and they continued to frolic along exactly as before.

As they crossed the factory floor, grim-faced engineers looked up with suddenly beaming and familiar smiles. Some waved at the tiny pair, but everyone who noticed them could be seen to palpably relax a few degrees, the tensions of their labour momentarily forgotten in the wake of the squirrels' bounding gait.

The curious thing was that through the hangar's filthy, high-set windows, it could clearly be seen to be winter. The sky was as grey as the hangar walls, and a fierce blizzard was dashing sheets of heavy, wet snowflakes against the blackened glass. The corroded window-frames were rattling in the howling gale, and it seemed like they might be torn free of their moorings and hurled into the hangar at any moment.

Seemingly oblivious to the tumultuous storm, Billy and Susie danced through the cavernous room, twitching their heads this way and that to acknowledge the greetings of the factorymen until at length they reached a partly-open emergency-exit door at the hangar's far side and wriggled through it.

The air outside was cold, and the weight of old exhaust fumes hung heavy around the empty roads. It was night now, and only the weak, sterile light of the moon picked out what few details scattered themselves around the thin ribbon of tarmac disappearing morosely into the blank distance. But the bleakness of the scene failed to dent the demeanour of the diminutive figures who still skipped on, for what seemed like endless hours with nothing but the driving, furious wind for company. And yet, where they had been, the storm seemed to settle mere moments behind them, leaving still tranquility in their wake even as they continued into the tempestuous way ahead.

Presently, as a paler version of the sun peered feebly over the horizon and seemed to shy away from the bleak and ugly morning awaiting it, the squirrels came to a railway crossing. A long goods train which seemed to stretch all the way back to the horizon lumbered slowly up the tracks in a cacophany of clattering, its progress so ponderous that the squirrels were able to hop into an open-sided car without breaking their stride, cross it in a couple of bounds and then hop out of the other side of the moving train a few yards further down the tracks, where they found themselves landing, paws still entwined, on a piece of flotsam floating down the stream of an outlet pipe that ran underneath the railway line. In perfect unison they stopped, sharp claws easily securing a safe hold in the dead wood that had once been a thick branch of an oak tree.

As the stream wound its way down a steepening hillside, it gathered pace, giving the dead branch momentum to shoulder its way past the jagged stones increasingly littering its path. The gloom of the night had cleared into a bright, frosty morning, and Billy and Susie seemed to be invigorated by the clouds of fine icy spray which reared up from the now-raging waters. They were moving at speed now, the hillside turning into rocky mountainside causing impacts which occasionally threw the squirrels' vessel clean into the air, landing back in the stream with a crash lost in the roar of the rushing stream. The channel cut by the powerful flow turned to a river, but the widening did nothing to dissipate its force, and even as it approached the cliff edge it was still a turbulent frenzy of white froth.

By the banks of the river, a couple of bedraggled and weary campers emerged from their tent into the cold morning sun, just as the hurtling log bearing the squirrels passed by the clearing where they'd pitched for the night. Double-taking as the little mammals surfed past, rock-steady and motionless on the bucking wreckage, the campers broke into broad grins, and one saluted extravagantly as Billy and Susie, paws still locked in each other's, released their grip on the dead branch and leapt into the sky a moment before the river plunged over the edge into the waterfall, taking the branch with it. As the tiny figures disappeared from view in the mist above the falls, it seemed to the campers on the bank that gravity itself was smiling indulgently at the little pair, their arcing trajectory curiously at odds with that expected by instinct, although somewhere beyond the campers' view, surely they must have fallen.

That's how I feel when I listen to "Noisy Summer" by the Raveonettes.
Y'know, in case you were wondering.