In Conclusion

The days will rumble on into September, warm and gradually cooling, shortening until December.  Perhaps the summer too will carry on, an Indian Summer in September/October, but for me the observations are over.

These journals have given me the focus on the everyday that I had aimed for, the minute appreciation of the everyday.  It has been difficult to sustain, this concentration, and sometimes difficult to find relevant things to write about; but generally it is a body of work I am pleased with.

What will I remember?  Making lemonade, lying on the ground in the Bedouin tent, strawberries in the Wye forest, buffet lunches for mums and babies, empty French roads and fields, water fights, fruit from the hedges, hot Sundays collecting firewood on the hill, the Milky Way over Evenjobb; but my abiding memory is standing in Eddie's vast barn gazing up at the tiles and laths far above my head, the floor of worn stone and packed earth; a summer-peaceful interlude between meals, conversations, summer games.  

An Ending Of Sorts

A house surrounded by owls, mainly from the hill behind; dark from 8.30 onwards.  Family staying in the pub, trees lit by the pub lights, soft warm darkness.

And suddenly the month ends and with it this journal and even a whole seasonal journals project running back two years.  I find it hard to slow down and think of the project as complete.

But driving home yesterday the fields here seemed richly golden, if perhaps heavily golden; the green of the trees looked tired and fading.  And it has been cooler, stuffier, damper.  It feels as if the summer is winding down.

A weekend of festivals, perhaps the festival season's last splurge; Presteigne Music, Creamfields and Mathew Street, Reading, Leeds, Notting Hill.  I always associate the August bank holiday with Larks in the Parks in Liverpool, a three day free music event in one of the city's parks.  I remember walking home across the park at the end of one event and seeing a patch of early autumn colour in the trees, and realising with a shock that summer was over.  

Summer at the Seaside

Just back from a few days in Southport, where we used to live.  A simple party yesterday to celebrate my parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary, a lovely afternoon of cake and children and buffet and champagne.  

It was too cold and windy to feel like the summer, but there were people in the town on holiday.  The beach was deserted but the amusement arcade was very busy.  I have always hated such places, to me they are noisy and expensive and far too busy.  Another version of the summer, though, a holiday of English seaside pleasures; amusement arcades, an afternoon on the beach, fish and chips, coloured strings of lights swaying in the evening breeze.  Blackpool we could see on the horizon, a nuclear glow at night.  It made me realise how little I miss urban life.  And perhaps what a miserable get I am.  

Crepuscule

I do not notice twilight unless I am out in it.  Tonight I found an hour to trim the hedge at the front and it got dark as I was working.  When I went outside the light was grey and starting to fade, when I came in the street light was on.

There is something very beautiful about working in fading light.  The eyes adapt very quickly so that electric light seems harsh and alien;  I trundled the wheelbarrow to the quarry in deep gloom and only saw people outside the pub by the light of their cigarettes and the low murmur of voices; yet I could see perfectly well.  Bats started to appear near the church, and when I was finished I watched them against the (surprisingly) bright grey of the last of the sunset.  It looked as though the sky was still lit but that the light had drained from the earth.  And it was nearly dark at 9pm.  

Is crepuscule a word?  It should be.

Unsettled

The unsettled and unpredictable weather continues.  One minute a heavy shower, one minute warm sunshine.  It is cool enough indoors to have the fire lit in the hall, where the washing is drying.  The line under the ash tree I have left out, hoping that the breeze will dry the clothes and that they will be protected from the showers.  

The garden birds have come back.  I put food out yesterday for the first time this summer and the garden was alive with birds all day.  Sparrows, great tits, blue tits, nuthatches, coal tits, even (I think) a garden warbler.  And again today the feeder has been almost emptied in about four or five hours.  

Schools start again next week and mornings and evenings are noticeably cooler.  There seem to be blackberries everywhere - lots of bushes on the hill behind the house and in the old lane - and I have been wondering about the hazelnuts in the hedge.  These seem to be signs of the season winding down, but then the sun comes out again and I think about shorts and meals outside.  

Smokes, Rains, Glooms

A run of wet, grey and gloomy days.  Yesterday was stuffy and close, an apt word for the tightness of the air; my chest didn't let me get far all day.  We managed to get up into the beech woods on the hill for a small firewood run, and gathered a good-sized bag of small logs.  It was too warm for a fire but far too wet to dry clothes outside.  The garden is heavy with water this morning, and the hills around the village are only occasionally visible, and there are slow rain clouds obscuring the Radnor Forest.  I wish it would rain properly; the air seems clearer when it rains. 

A Day of Birds

Some days we see more than others.  Yesterday I was in the garden looking at the view and a sparrowhawk flew through the garden and landed in the ash tree about fifteen feet above my head.  I think it was a juvenile as it seemed a little unsure of itself.  A beautiful pale silver colour, banded with darker stripes, with a darker head.  The bird was hidden in the tree but there was an anxious mob of swallows and house martins high above the ash, a swirling mass of birds calling and shrieking at the sparrowhawk.  After about five minutes - five minutes - it flew back the way it came, over the garden and out towards the valley, with a halo of mobbing birds above it.  I hate saying 'it' but I don't know if it was a male or a female.  

Then sitting in the living room in the late afternoon I glanced up to see a red kite swing out of the woods and down the hillside towards the valley side.  

And in the early evening two buzzards were mewing at each other - in play or courtship or war I do not know - in and out of the trees above the house, tumbling over each other in the air, through the trees then out and back again, until they disappeared over towards the quarry.  

Different Seasons

A strange day, uncertain and indistinct; warm sunshine one moment, torrential rain the next.  Cold enough to light the fire then warm again.  Some friends here for lunch and the children were in and out, baffled and bemused by the weather playing tricks on them.  And now at 9 o'clock at night it is nearly dark and windy.  A night for candles.  

Hay Fields

The hay seems almost all cut, and the fields are a bright golden stubble which fades to a warmer, dark-brown gold after a day or two.  Some neat fields are full of giant cylindrical hay bales awaiting collection, others are still snaked with long thick lines of hay waiting for the turners and the balers.  These wide, heavy lines of hay across the golden stubble look like brown-yellow paint thickly squirted from a tube, something Van Gogh-heavy about them, rich and thick and almost liquid.  

Bird Tales

And yet over Ludlow there were no swifts.  We have had one or two pairs in the village - over the village - this summer, but here too they seem to have gone.  The swallows I saw on the telegraph wires a week or so ago were perhaps not playing but preparing to leave in earnest.  Only the house martins are still here, a small tumble of them high up in the evening blue sky tonight.  

I have been adopted, or rather I have been putting crumbs out through the revamped kitchen window and  have three regulars, a scruffy robin, a scruffy blackbird and a scruffy thrush.  I assume they are this season's fledglings and still finding their feet when it comes to fending for themselves. Something as small as this can become a summer pleasure.  

Golden Ludlow

A morning in Ludlow in old furniture shops, junk shops, narrow streets.  A sort of summer ending, with the taking-down of the Ludlow Summer Show, the town's art event; a large modern room in a building 800 years old, a room in transition, half dismantled art exhibition, half returning computer terminals and work tables.  A flood of light into this modern annex, especially the hallway; shadows and warm sunlight on the carpet, an ending of the college's summer even in mid-August, a return of the holiday-stillness of such places, an anticipation of the autumn's students.  

In Friday's Footsteps

I have always been fascinated by the glimpses of one season in another, the cold days in summer that make me think of crumpets, the warm deceptive days in March. Today we were up on the hill gathering firewood against the winter, and there were large patches of red/gold in the horse chestnut trees.  They have also started producing tiny conkers.  Our neighbours' view of the hill has larger patches of autumnal colour in it, something they have been aware of for a few days.  At the very top of the hill, the fence around the quarry has been overgrown with brambles and there are plump juicy blackberries in amongst the nettles and rose-bay willow herb.  I stood at the top and looked up to Kington and then round to Clee Hill, 40 miles away, and then round to the Radnor Forest and on into Wales.  The top of the hill is being cleared and then blasted in the autumn, so the fence and blackberries and 50 feet of hillside - bracken, trees, grass - will go.  A strange thought.  We have been gathering as much firewood as we can, and today I saw a piece of cut wood with nails in; a new piece, in all probability left by the professional woodsmen who were there in the spring.  But I am not used to seeing signs of other people up there, and it was as startling as seeing Man Friday's footprints on Crusoe's deserted beach.  

Fruits

A day of fruit; Italian peaches ripening on the window ledge in the kitchen, to catch the sun, tomatoes, blackberries.   The sun moved slowly on its age-old path and I came into the kitchen to find it shining through a bottle of olive oil, sending slender golden beams onto the work surface.  Bowls of fruit and jars of oil; simple kitchen pleasures.  

We were given our first home-grown tomatoes the other day, very sweet cherry and baby plum ones.  Absolutely delicious, grown in a greenhouse this high up.  Ours are still small and green and probably won't be ready for a few weeks.  We get our everyday tomatoes from an organic farm, where they are grown in tunnels and are small and sweet.  And occasionally I buy a bag of cheap ones, just to roast them.  

The garden is still providing fruit too; unexpected gooseberries, rescued raspberries, ripening blackberries.  The brambles on the cemetery hedge have plump black fruit on them, but they are not sweet yet.  

Of Raspberries

And then a mixed day, sultry and overcast this morning, warming and sunny this afternoon.  I finished work and we went picking raspberries on the fruit farm near Stansbatch, the other side of the hill from where we lived last year. A glorious afternoon, hot enough for straw hats in the empty field of raspberry canes - the strawberries, gooseberries and currants have all finished - and the fruit hanging on the branches like miniature bunches of grapes, velvet red and almost jewel-like, the sun shining through the fruit, motionless and perfect.  An afternoon of children sticky with fruit, sunshine, blue skies.  The plants too like lines of grapevines six feet high, the leaves already drying and turning to browns and soft reds, autumn-in-summer, reminding me of red wine and cooling days.  

I have developed a taste for soft fruit.  I remember my Scots grandmother's neat lines of raspberry canes in Dartington Road, some faint link perhaps with Scotland where they grow so well.  

Sticky Day

Yesterday was a golden, warm, bright fresh day; today has been the exact opposite, sultry and sticky and overcast.  I find this sort of weather quite oppressive, heavy on my chest, the sort of weather that gives headaches.  And then the sun will shine for a moment and threaten the heaviness, but it will pass.  

We discovered yesterday that the broccoli are being devoured by cabbage white butterflies, and we have seen a number of these in the garden.  The tiny chard are now heavily protected.  The courgettes alone seem invulnerable to attack.  

The Golden Horde

A beautiful day we had of it.  Golden sunshine and no wind, breakfast outside in the warmth.  Some frantic tidying and then at 10.30 the Mums and the Babies descended.  We had about 20 people here so we sat outside and I kept the tea and the cake flowing.  People were very generous and unasked brought eggs, cake, fruit, more cake.  The children ran small riot and got every toy in the house was out and apart on the living room floor. There were cake and half-cups of juice everywhere.  Odd bits of cake were found balanced.  

Everyone left except for a small group who stayed for lunch.  We ate outside under the ash tree then made dens in the back garden and a huge Bedouin tent (with a bedspread and the washing line) which we filled with blankets and cushions and bears and children and stories.    I watched the light on the bedspread roof, dappled through the tree, simple beauty.

When the garden was empty I sat for a moment in the sunshine and watched a buzzard over the valley, huge gentle circles over the hill and a weird mewing.  We saw the peregrine again over the woods.  It was a delightful day, warm and sunny and full of play and happy children and cake.   

A Pattern of Light

We sat outside and looked across the valley towards the Radnor Forest, but now at 9.20pm it is almost dark.  This is the way the days start to shorten, when we least expect it and at times we are not present.  I am usually awake from 6.30 onwards when it is starting to get light, but a month ago of course it was light an hour before that. Having said that the wind woke me - and the dog - at 4.30am, a slow wind rising, banging the doors through the open windows and bringing a light rain.  I got up to close the windows and the world outside was a heavy soft grey, thick like woollen mist, the very faint beginnings of the dawn.  

Today it felt stuffy and heavy and damp, jeans weather not weather for linens.  Yesterday was warm and we sat outside at a friend's house, a garden full of shrieking children, the table groaning with North African food, heavy rich scents for a hot day.  The sunlight on a green hayfield, no wind, perfect motionless trees.  The fields are golden with wheat or stubble, the hedgerows thick smudges of green, the landscape an abstract pattern of greens and golds, dark boundaries and bright open fields.  

Gardens Again

Fruit is starting to appear in the hedges and leftover parts of the garden.  There are hazels in the hedges which seem to be producing handfuls of nuts, and we have found gooseberries, blackberries (some already ripe) and raspberry canes buried beneath bramble and snowberry; a major job a day or so ago to rescue four canes and transplant them to the shallot bed.  The shallots have now all been harvested and make a tidy bagful.  The broccoli is being ravaged by small green and black caterpillars, and the chard is being attacked by slugs.  So we have some small successes and some small failures, and we learn our lessons and think ahead.  I love harvesting and cooking food we have grown ourselves.  We have had a few courgettes (and three marrows by accident) and many shallots.  And the tomatoes are starting to develop and we might yet have peppers.  

Gardens and Birds

I spent all yesterday afternoon in the garden, a rare luxury.  But I was attacking the grass, which in the warm damp weather we had here whilst we were in France has grown rampant.  The paths around the veg beds are now usable and I managed to cut as far as the snail gate leading to the lane, i.e. to the top of the garden.  A great sense of achievement, especially as I was badly stung by nettles.  I also trimmed edges and tidied the chard and the broccoli, both badly attacked by snails/slugs.  My habit of using empty snail shells as caps for poles is clearly not working as a deterrent.  

And walking through the garden in the early evening, tidying the woodpile, I saw a peregrine flying very low and very fast into the house martins feeding around the church.  It swooped across the cemetery from the woods on the hill, but didn't catch anything.  We watched it fly back into the trees.  Then this morning I saw a great spotted woodpecker on the tree over by the old hearse house in the churchyard.  I stood and watched it through the binoculars for several minutes.  A lovely morning, warm and sunny.  

Anniversaries

After me talking about 'Abbey Road' as a definitive summer album, the papers today carry the story that this Saturday sees the 40th anniversary of the iconic photograph of the Beatles walking across the famous zebra crossing.  Quiet London, then well off the beaten track, the silence of an empty sunny afternoon.  And now the studios carries a 24/7 webcam of the crossing, complete with London dusk, couriers on skates, white vans.  

So I am reminded that two of my favourite films are also 40 years old this year.  'The Italian Job', with its haunting music and sense of easy European-ness, a summer spent dodging the Mafia and stealing bullion, the Alps within easy reach.  And the Michael Winner picture 'Hannibal Brooks', Oliver Reed spending a hot out-of-time summer above the tree line, the second world war intruding every now and then; deserted Nazi alpine villages, sunshine, vast stony silences and an elephant called Lucy.  

A Day of Seven Kites

I drove over to the council recycling centre at Llandeglau twice today, to recycle the night storage heaters that we have had taken out.  A good job to get rid of them and recycle the metal etc.  The road has some spectacular views west into Radnorshire, twenty miles of fields and hills and trees, receding into the distance as if it goes on forever.  And on the tight curves of the road after Llanfihangel were red kites, four on one journey and three on the next, making a day when I saw seven kites.  One was hunting over a hayfield which had recently been cut, the grass piled into long sinuous lines across the hillside, close enough to catch the red and cream of its feathers as the sun caught it.  An astonishing, commonplace sight, what Pat Barker would call an extraordinary ordinary thing.  

Radnor Bottoms

Talking to the Tesco delivery man tonight about place names.  He is a man fascinated by the nearness of old things and of history; we have talked before about the Romans in the valley and the prehistoric remains that were possibly old when the Romans arrived.  He told me tonight that his father called the valley the 'Radnor Bottoms' and said that it was the only level ground in old Radnorshire.  

I was up at 6am and the valley between this hill and the hill behind Evenjobb was hidden under a thick white blanket of mist.  The first sunlight was lighting the church tower which was awash with house martins.  But later in the morning the swallows were starting to gather on the telegraph wires.  

And two encounters with unusual reptiles; I was on the road between Birley and Ivington on my way to buy gas canisters and a large snake was crawling across the road.  It was about two and a half feet long, grey with a diamond pattern along its flanks.  I assume it was an adder.  And a slow worm was seen on Old Radnor Hill, hiding beneath the sheets put out by the quarry's reptile survey.  

Clouds and Shadows

Warm sunshine and a light breeze after a run of damp, stuffy days.  The grass in the cemetery is having is monthly trim.  Bluebottles trapped behind glass, white butterflies out in the garden.  I harvested another courgette at lunchtime.  Great to be able to see the Radnor Forest, hidden for days behind low cloud and rains. 

I watched the huge clouds moving across the fields when I was hanging out the washing, just stood watching the cloud shadows rolling across the fields and hedges.  

Summer in the City

I always think of London as a summer city, or rather when I think of summers in the city it is London I remember.  Hot dusty streets and crowded trains contrast with cool grass and wide open spaces, cool dark pubs and afternoon pints.  The 'Abbey Road' album cover with its suggestion of heat and emptiness, a Maurice Utrillo mood of quiet corners and ordinary lives and all the bustle happening elsewhere.  I used to get up when everyone had gone, throw on a pair of shorts and sit in the garden in Sydenham, the grass cool and damp or already hot and dry and scratchy beneath my feet.  Swifts overhead, distant lawns being mowed, even a sheep from the small children's farm in the school.  Huge summer silences, clouds over a blue sky, emptiness.

And things happen in London in the summer time.  I saw Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square, a short speech on the balcony of South Africa House, Virginia Bottomley and Prince Andrew almost swept away by the crowd, who ignored them.  The tea pavilions at the Serpentine Gallery, the only one I have seen designed by Daniel Liebeskind, an annual temporary excursion into cutting edge architecture, absolutely free.  

Perhaps in summer cities we need an escape, a cool place to retreat to and take stock.  I wouldn't enjoy summer London as much from a hotel room.  

Days of Rain

It has rained on and off since we came home.  The house smells of rain and woodsmoke, as the fire has been kept going to dry clothes.  I never thought we would have the wood-burner going in August, but I suppose that there are times when we would have the heating on to dry clothes if we had any.  Perhaps this is one of those strange times when one season intrudes on another, autumn in summer.  We stood at the Lugg in Presteigne this afternoon and watched a small boy throw stones in; the river was swollen and fast-moving after so much recent rain.  

After two quiet days, this evening the sky over the village was suddenly, quickly, alive with swallows and swifts .  A sudden burst of activity and shrieking, and they were gone.  A sobering thought that in a fortnight or so the swifts will have gone.  

A Two-Thirds Time

The season is slowly passing.  It is no longer possible to do things in June and all the July events have happened; all the fetes and garden parties and festivals and revolutionary remembrances.  Summer seems the most precious of the seasons, the most fragile, the most easily damaged.  For that reason it is the one most associated with the past, with our ideas of our own childhoods, the time of year we look back on with the fondest memories.  And we look back to holidays as well, to ourselves as relaxed and care-free, even if we are just playing out at home.  

The Quietness of Sundays

A day that threatened rain that didn't come.  I spent the afternoon in the garden, hacking back the hedges and cutting the grass, which in places is eighteen inches tall and has turned a golden colour - grass becoming wheat. It is no longer reasonable to call the grass a 'lawn' so jokingly it is now a meadow or a wild flower garden, although the only flowers at the moment are small purple lavender-type flowers.  The 'lawn' has become 'Welsh prairie gardening'!  I will attack it again soon.  The brambles have taken over in our absence and were ruthlessly cut back, unless they were flowering or had small tight green blackberries on them.  The ley-line lane is the best place in the area for blackberries, apparently, so blackberries are being left. We also found a new gooseberry bush in the cemetery hedge and more raspberries by the writing shed - this autumn the hedges are going to be savagely trimmed.  

August

A wet start to a new month.  Presteigne this morning was dissolving in drizzle, no views out of the town, the air heavy with water.  Swifts somewhere overhead, invisible, just their shrieks heard above the town's noises.  We bought some bits from the charity shops and collected our organic veg bag and some spiced buns, a favourite with us.  It has rained on and off all day.  

But tonight I prepared our first part-home-grown meal.  We came home to three large courgettes/small marrows.  The largest one I have hollowed out and made the hollowings into risotto, with a bunch of home-grown shallots, which I will stuff back into the shell and bake slowly.  That's tomorrow's tea sorted.  

Dark from about 9.30 these days.  Trevor, a distant neighbour, has been trimming the hedge with an industrial brushcutter; we can now see much further.  It won't give us any daylight but it has opened the views across the valley in two directions.  

Rain

Much cooler here.  We came home yesterday to a house cold and smelling of holiday cottages; a mixture of dust and old floors and stone and plaster. Trapped summers, hidden in the walls...

Here it has rained all day and it has been gloomy.  The garden has taken advantage again and has run riot, so I will need to get out with the shears and the strimmer.  We had gigantic courgettes becoming marrows; I will roast them for antipasti or might stuff them with rice and peppers.  The tomatoes look hopeful as do the peppers.  And the olive trees (small olive trees) which lost their leaves over the hard winter we had have finally both come back.  I read recently that all olive trees need is silence and sunshine, but perhaps the recent wet weather helped as well!

Abroad Thoughts from Home

What will I remember?  The heavy woods, the empty straight roads, the dry golden grass.  Eddie's barn, its apex sixty feet above my head, great sweeps of tiles, its beams eleven metres long.  The beaten earth floor, the sunlight.  The vertical thunderstorms over the valley of the L'Asse river.  Limoges on an empty Sunday.  Tiling the pig sty roof as the Romans would have done it, wooden beams on rough walls, tiles hung on thin laths, each tile held in place by the support of its neighbours and a thumb's smudge when the clay was still wet, thumb prints still visible today.  Lizards.  Monastic living at long tables of food, candlelight and beer.  The church clock chiming twice for the field workers.  Clouds of swifts, house martins and swallows, a young fledgling buzzard somewhere in the woods over the valley, the same mewing sound here this afternoon from the buzzards fledged in these woods.  What will I remember?  Sunlight and painted shutters, wooden floors and ancient dust.  And that barn...

French Grey

Montmorillon is our nearest town. It seems typically French, an old core and modern industrial suburbs of identikit French streets. We went to the market in the old town this morning, lots of fresh vegetables and mushrooms, oysters, fresh cakes and noodles. A washed pale blue day hot after last night's thunder, the sky above the market square full of swifts.

There is a melancholy to France that I cannot place. Their streets seem gloomy sometimes, their cemeteries extensions of the streets or the other way round; their older pop music seems brushed with sadness and loss, their modern tat shops sell small cemetery plaques, as if this is a country obsessed with death. Yet this is not the real mood of place so where does it come from? My reaction to urban landscape - I will think on this further.

I had forgotten how heavily wooded it is here. The fields of golden stubble are surrounded by thick woods and the straight roads drive through mile after mile of forest. Sunlight through July leaves, dappled onto dry forest floor, bone-dry grasses. And yet the association of 'forestiére' sauces, creamy-rich with mushrooms or heavy with sausages of wild boar meat, red with tomatoes and blood.

July Storms

An astonishing thunderstorm last night. It was hot all afternoon and no cooler as the sun went down. I wrote the house journal on the terrace with a beer and a candle, watching slow, heavy lilac clouds building on the other side of the valley. Distant rumbles and tall flashes of lightning far away to begin with, but near enough to light the heavy clouds in great vertical flashes, turning the clouds a hundred grey colours from a deep angry almost-black to a brilliant white. The rain was torrential, the wind very strong, but only in short bursts. Loud constant rumbles of thunder as the storm passed overhead, bright lightning flashes and then flashes muffled by the clouds. It went on for an hour and a half or more as we slowly dozed and settled into deeper sleep.

It reminded me that Thomas Hardy's grandmother always remembered what a hot summer it had been for the French Revolution, presumably for the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

A Letter from France

It feels as if we have been here forever. Brigeuil is a small village and typically French, red roofs and white shuttered houses, surrounded by miles of thick woods and fields. Owls at night and swifts and swallows during the day. Our days are marked by the church bells, which chime each hour twice for the field workers. We have been working on the house and have been out only rarely; to Montmorillon (the nearest town) for supplies and to Roni and Eddie's house in Les Clotures for a good lunch, cake, tea - and internet access! Their barn is huge, the size of a medieval church, steep tiled roofs and rough plaster walls, with cross-beams 11 metres long. It is attached to the house and has bats and house martins living in it. Their village is quiet and full of birds, their garden full of onions and herbs, tomatoes, lettuce, and sweetcorn. I walked along the rough track at their gate and found a field of sunflowers, and helped Eddie secure their vine to the barn wall; it is burdened with not-quite-ripe grapes.

We have been eating lots of cheese and drinking wine and French beer. At night we talk and eat well by candlelight. Warm, lazy, busy days.

Bastille

The fourteenth of July and we are on our way to France.  We are staying in Dover, as Shelley did, and will arrive on French soil the day after Bastille Day, as Wordsworth did; I like such historical links, and as a writer feel I am walking in the footsteps of giants.  

The south of England looked parched and barren compared with the fields on the Borders.  There are far more hay fields and the gold of the hay and the parched gold of the wayside grass seems to make a landscape - a fieldscape - of golden grass and heavy green trees.  Wiltshire always seems to be made up of long low hills of grass, how I imagine Kansas.  Then suddenly we are in Dover and then on the A2, as Shelley was nearly two centuries ago.  And tomorrow, France...

The Outside World

On Friday we went to an insipid arts event at Croft Castle.  The work was all over the grounds and we walked past the castle to the fields.  The hay had been cut recently, and the swallows were skimming the stubble for insects, inches above the ground.  They were oblivious to the hordes of art people, and were quartering the large lawn in front of the buildings for more food.  And on the doorstep of the castle I heard tweeting and looked up to see a house martin's nest about four feet over my head, with a small martin peering out; the next minute the adult swept in and fed it and then was gone.  There was an irregular row of mud nests in the crevice of the doorframe.  Then on the way out of the estate we had to pull off the road for the tractor, beginning to bring the wrapped hay bales in from the fields.  

Stair Moments

I love the idea of a window on a staircase, a place to pause on the up or the down, a place to stand with armfuls of washing or ironing and have a moment away from the house and to take in the world outside.   Last night I paused at the top of the stairs and looked across the valley towards New Radnor.  The evening was cloudy and sultry, threatening rain, but I caught a moment when the sun came out strongly and the hedge-trees and tall bushes on the field boundaries sent long shadows across the field; a moment and it was gone.  

Rainy Season

Today was the church fete, but the rain held off until tea time.  We had guests so didn't go, but it seems a very British thing, a summer fete, something elegant and dignified and precarious and ever so slightly silly.  Instead we wandered around the village in the stuffy warmth, watching small boys with water pistols and having a glass of beer overlooking the valley.  We showed them the church and I sat in the porch with the dog, thinking about how many other 600 year old porches I had sat in, and how short a period of its life my sit was.  

Now it is 10.15 and I am listening to the steady silvery roar of the rain in the garden, listening to it from different rooms, from different open windows.  Warm rain is a summer pleasure; I went out to check the cloche'd plants were getting enough water and the air was damp and warm, even at 9pm.  An early dusk but we need the rain.  The solid iron box of the wood-burning stove becomes the heart of the house again, warming copper pipes and the surrounding stonework; turned right down to nothing it will burn slowly all night, to spring to life again when we go down in the morning.  Stone responds well to water, cooling the rooms in summer and retaining the stove's heat in the winter.  It is an evening for the soft ruddy glow on bare walls, candlelight and open windows.  

Summer's Melancholy

One consequence of keeping a journal like this one is a realisation of the passing of time.  Already we are nearly halfway through my imposed sense of summer; already it is impossible to do things in June this year, already the early summer has slipped away.  Sports days and end-of-terms have come and gone, at least for most of the schools around here.  Up north I think they might break up next Friday, so perhaps it is possible to trace a journey around the country, catching end-of-term after end-of-term, as a friend used to do at school in Liverpool. But we are still eating strawberries, and seasons cannot be imposed onto the calendar, or rather the calender cannot be fitted over the seasons, so it will still be warm in September, where I began these seasonal thoughts four years ago!    

Evening Stillness

A cooler evening tonight, but a fine sunset over the bare hills of the Radnor Forest.  It has been cool enough during the days recently to relight the fire in the hall, which provides us with hot water.  The fire is the heart of an old house like this one; electricity just isn't the same.  

A rare trip to Ludlow this morning.  The hedges all the way are full and shaggy, lots of young growth, lots of tall grass in the verges.  I love the green darkness that comes with this summery growth, the suggestion of dark silences, watchful green depths.  Green Man thoughts.  The roads were red-yellow with field-muds turned to dust, as it is haymaking time and the bales are stacked in the fields awaiting collection.  On the back roads sometimes we have seen the huge combine harvesters, usually in two cumbersome parts.  The first is a tractor pulling the blades, as long as a glider, folded and wafer-thin; behind comes the harvester itself, swerving and nervy, with the thundering capering grace of a tamed elephant.

From the Garden

I was lucky enough to spend most of the evening in the garden.  I have mentioned that the grass is taking advantage of my good nature and has run riot.  Tonight I strimmed the top half of the garden, the vegetable patch, and the newly-shorn area looks bigger and better managed.  I lifted the first of the shallots, that we bought as sets from Presteigne a few months ago, and they are now drying in the rear hall.  I also repotted some chard seedlings that have struggled in one of the vegetable beds and only just fought off the slugs; I did the same yesterday with some rocket plugs that had been decimated.  I suppose the garden is at its height, at least for this year.  The lavender have all flowered, some spectacularly, and most of the rescue plants in the nursery bed - plants that have been in pots since we left Southport two years ago - have recovered, flowered and put on growth. 

The days are still long, and at 10pm tonight it was only just dusk.  It is noticeably cooler than it was this time last week, and we were surprised by a hot spell this afternoon; we realised how easily we had slipped back into jeans and heavier shirts.  

Grass Tales Again

Some mornings the valley is completely hidden by mist, and the hill seems to float above the valley.  Only the tops of the trees are visible.  On other days the fields are obscured by moving sheets of rain, and the hills across the valley are indistinct or invisible.  This morning we woke to sulky showers of heavy rain, hiding the valley in cloud, obscuring the bald hills. It has turned wet and cooler after a week or two of warm dry weather.  The grass loves it and is growing at a fantastic rate.  I have never lived anywhere with so much grass and have become mildly obsessed by it, from letting it grow to cutting it short, from trimming the shaggy edges around the veg beds to letting the seed heads grow tall.  The wild flowers have a slow passage through the season, from the hawkweed and the mountain cornflowers starting to fade to the nursery flowers such as the rescue-lavenders coming into flower.  And after a fortnight of flowering the roses are all but finished.  

The Perfect Summer's Day

It is not possible to devise a perfect day without being selfish, without ignoring the reality of life; work, children, loved ones, responsibilities.  But this is my blog so here goes.  

With the warm sun streaming in through the window I would wake quite early, so I would take my breakfast back to bed with yesterday's papers then take a long hot bath. The housework would have been done, so I would be free to dress simply - I remember one summer when I just threw on a pair of shorts and a clean shirt and I was out - and go out into the garden.  Summer is a time for slowing the pace, so the rest of the morning - if there was any left - I would read in the garden.  A long lunch - French cheese and grapes and crusty bread, maybe a beer or a glass of wine - then a nap under the trees. More reading and more sitting in the garden, then a light evening meal outside with a beer or three and maybe more wine.  Then I would sit with my glass and watch the sun go down, lighting the garden candles as the light failed and the swifts and swallows were replaced by bats and owls from the woods.  The garden would grow gently chilly and I would be driven indoors, to go to bed at about 10pm.  

But in truth I would probably be restless, if not bored.  I am not used to such leisure, such deliberate inactivity.  I am not one of those people who sits on a beach on their holidays, I need things to do.  I would like to be that quiet reader in the garden with his wine, but his inactivity would probably irritate me!

Monsoon

The warm weather seems to have broken.  Last night and for most of today we have had heavy showers, which have refilled the water butt and drenched the garden, which was much needed.  The grass everywhere is very tall, the chard are picking up, the courgettes are starting to flower and the broccoli seems to have established itself.  I always plan to deep-fry courgette flowers with rice and mushrooms inside as I ate this once in Rome; but here I am still cooking on a camping stove so it's probably a waste.  

Warm wet days and nights have their own beauty.  I love reading at night with the window open, or lying in bed by candlelight with the window open listening to the steady rain.  I left the kitchen windows open the other night and left the light on by accident; going in to prepare supper the ceiling was alive with moths and small insects, but I ignored them and left the window as it was and they had all gone by the morning.

Grass Tales

For one group at least the summer holidays are already over.  Our friend Katie arrived early this morning to collect the chickens, six Silkies who have had their holiday and have now been taken home.  We enjoyed having them. They lived on the top field in a large 'pen' or area chicken-wired off from the rest of the garden, and had complete freedom within it.  They ate garden scraps and some corn.  Silkies are winter layers apparently so we didn't get many eggs.  

But now they are gone the archaeology of their landscape is revealed.  The pen was built across a pattern of cut  grass, i.e. a perimeter path of short grass around a large island of uncut grass, what I optimistically called 'the wildflower meadow'.  The chicken wire fence cut across this and the path on that side and the 'meadow' were left to the chickens.  Like a miniature Berlin Wall, the fence changed the landscape; on this side the old path was lost as the whole lawn was cut short (ish) and on the chickens' side it all began to disappear beneath new growth and chicken trampling.  Now it has gone, the line is marked by a narrow band of taller grass, unable to be pecked by the birds or reached by my mowing.  The coop too has left a yellow square of deadish grass around a tuft that did get some light.  The chickens' field is like one of those ancient villages seen from the air during a drought.

I am thinking along these silly lines because of a recent article in the paper about the old landscape of the Berlin Wall and the border between East and West Germany, now dismantled.  600 miles long and (I think) up to a mile wide, it is the largest wildlife reserve in Germany and over forty years it attracted an astonishing array of wildlife rare elsewhere, simply because it was inaccessible to people.  

Missed (The Fourth of July)

No fireworks here for Independence Day, despite a scattering of Americans in the area.   It reminded me that July is a month for celebrating revolutions, whether American or French.   Today the warm weather sputtered out, it was cooler this morning and then this evening we had an almighty rainstorm.  No wind, and the rain was coming down so heavily it was bouncing on the church roof, creating a sort of mist about a foot off the slates.  It is now (at 9.45pm) starting to get dark and the sky is still overcast.  The garden is full of a wild, wet darkness.  

I may have mentioned that I have left the garden and hardly cut any grass or hedges since the spring.  There is a practical reason for this as we wanted to see what grew, and this afternoon we found a raspberry patch; or rather we found raspberry bushes in amongst brambles and sprawled hedge.  Free raspberries!  The grass has taken full advantage of my indolence and thrown up great long stems and long seedheads, making the top lawn look like a meadow.  The seedheads have a fascinating range of colour, from green-gold to red-gold and a polished bronze. On warm sunny evenings I can see the light between the house and the church, the seedheads forming a thin golden haze above the grass, the gnats dancing in the sunshine.  But not tonight.  

Summer Food

My thoughts turn to heavy food in the winter - soups and roasts, potatoes and root vegetables - and to the Mediterranean in the summer.  So the smell of basil made me think of pesto and tomatoes; when a friend came for a meal the other night I made a pesto-and-tomato salad to go with the creamy, cheesy tomato pasta, and a garlic bread; sticky with butter and oil, my hands smelled of garlic and basil and tomato juice.  We ripped the bread apart and made mouthfuls of pasta and sauce and bread.  And Alan brought a sack of Ludlow Gold, the local real ale, a light, powerful summer brew.  Golden ale, the association of summer.  

But for once, perhaps bowing to the formality of a guest for a meal, we ate it inside; as much as possible we are eating outside at the moment, enjoying the warm days and sunshine.  We have had temperatures of 31 degrees C, which is really warm for us.  It means endless watering but breakfasts outside.  Summer eating!

A Long Way from Italy

In ten days or so I will be halfway through my summer of June, July and August; the summer barely seems to have started and yet I have been in shorts and light shirts for some days now, my usual early summer insecurity about shorts long forgotten.

A seasonal awareness is about small things.  Choosing bathroom tiles we found ourselves on a Hereford trading estate on a blazing hot day, in a stuffy warehouse full of repro tiles.  But we also found a few boxes of genuine stone tiles, travertine and marble, pale slices of an Italian hillside; they looked like thick slices of bone.  The dust rubbed itself into my finger, this Italian road-dust, the ivory/cream fabric of the country itself.  And then, a five-minute dash into the supermarket for supplies and I brushed against some struggling basil plants in the reduced box; and in the middle of a hot afternoon and a busy shop the thick smell of basil was suddenly, briefly, everywhere; then it was gone.  

Lazy Days

There is a perceived, perhaps a remembered, laziness to summer days.  I was thinking of writing my perfect summer day and realised that a lot of it centred on doing nothing at all; reading, sitting, reading, probably a beer.  Perhaps this sense of slowness is a memory of childhood summer holidays, the best thing about the school year being the gaps between them.  Drowsy heat, bees in the borders, long afternoons sitting in the overgrown garden; the ideal summer day.  Yet how often are my days like this?  I get bored sitting, even sitting to read - but not to drink, I've noticed - so even a lazy day is made up of lots of things, of pottering.  Yet still the ideal remains, perhaps because it is unachievable and even unwanted.  

Having said that I made a great summer afternoon, as the weather has been so good.  We baked a chocolate cake this morning and I made lemonade after lunch then washed out a few washing-up liquid bottles so that the boys could have water fights.  Sunshine, water fights, lemonade, chocolate cake; what more is there to a summer afternoon?  Then as I was tidying the garden there was somebody playing the organ in the church over the road. But I am coming to realise that these things don't just happen, one must make them happen, then smaller accidental beautiful things will fit in to the pattern one has made.  

July

And now it is July and the run of settled, warm, occasionally wet weather has continued.  It feels like a proper summer.  Writing something like this has forced me to consider my day-to-day in a seasonal context, as if seeing every day through the prism of the season.  A good exercise, it has rooted me in the passing or turning of the year.  

A list of recent summery things, then; strawberries and cream, sports days, other people's holidays, the warm weather, Glastonbury and Wimbledon, lazy, stupid flies, the daily chore of watering the tomatoes and peppers, late late nights with daylight until 9.30 or 10pm, massively overgrown garden hedges, lavender flowers, shorts and no socks, every meal eaten outside... 

We do not have two pennies to rub together but the quality of our days is astonishing; and as if to prove it, my wife has just walked in with the first flowers of the Californian bluebells and the news that the courgettes have started to flower.  I am a lucky man.  

High Summer

A thick golden haze over the valley just now, a dusty light, long shadows.  We are having an official heatwave and it has been warm and thundery for some days now.   Things rumble on below my radar that define the summer.  Wimbledon, its London intensity of greenery and white flannels and packed roads mixed with the country house picnic of Pimms and strawberries.  (Summer cities I will return to.)  And Glastonbury, the modern, cynical, commercial version of a 1960s festival, suddenly become a trendy thing to do, all photo-ID tickets and fashionable wellies.  

And then we heard voices in the field and two lost holidaymakers came over the fence.  They are staying in a local farmhouse, a 400 year old holiday property, and were heading into the village.  Their brochure described this as a 'hamlet' which I suppose it is.  And I forget that, from Easter, people take holidays - well, they do all year round but Easter-October is still the official holiday season - and that many people we see are on holiday.  The pub isn't open on a Monday and there is nothing else to do; but it is a beautiful, warm soft evening to do nothing in.  

Rain Keep Falling

Torrential rains today, the water butt is full again and the overflow butt is a third full, so for once I am free of watering duties.  Driving to Presteigne this morning it was warm and dusty - breakfast outside, a rare treat - and this afternoon it was warm and very wet.  Rain-mists drifting through the pine trees on Shropshire hills, dripping off the low trees at the school.  The weather unsettled the birds; we saw two woodpeckers - probably great spotted we think, too black-and-white for green woodpeckers and too big for lesser spotteds - over the fields at the back and feeding on the telegraph poles, and two siskins pecked at the depleted seed tubes in front of the living room windows.   There were hundreds of swifts over Presteigne, presumably feeding off the rising columns of insects who were anticipating the rain storms.  The storms passed and this evening it is stuffy and close once more, but of course it was great for the garden.  

Tree-lines, Wood-words

This is a place of split definitions, Welsh words and English words, a place of unexpected alignments.  The Radnor Forest looks Welsh, dramatic , distant, even harsh, whilst the woods on the hill seem typically English; full of dappled light and birdsong.  Both in Wales, both equally high, yet these comparisons remain.  

Felled trees on the hillside like the elephant's graveyard, huge tree-limbs and grass hidden in trunk-crotches, grey bark paling in the sun, un-nourished by the roots.  A place of giants, even fallen they seem to tower over us.  The exposed bark softens in colour from angry creams to greys and silvers.  The woods have moved, a margin has been cut, the hilltop and tree-line have been redefined magically, heavily, beautifully.  Roads torn for heavy machines are healing, crumbling and disappearing beneath new grass.  Wood up close is heavy, immobile, even awkward, suddenly uprooted and left out on the hill.  The stumps still stand and if left would sprout again perhaps, recover from this massive pollarding; but in October the hillside will go, will be blown up by the quarry for Olympic roads.  

A Day on the Hill

A warm, sultry day, cloudy and occasionally sunny.  And still dry, no serious rain now for some weeks.  We spent the day on and off the hill behind the house, as a friend was cutting some felled trees for our kitchen counter tops. The beech tree was felled some weeks ago, and we hoped would be big enough for some counter tops.  Sherwood and Rob arrived with a double chainsaw and a Land Rover full of kit, but the tree had a strange inner space - chamber, abscess - caused by long-ago rainwater; invisible from the outside the water had created a large black void within the tree.  So our counter tops won't be as big as we had hoped, but we have some two-inch thick slabs of wood - no other word - which will make something.  And we had a lovely day in the beech, oak and chestnut woods on the hill above the sheep fields.  I managed a short walk away from the chainsaws onto what I realised is moorland, a thin crust of tough grasses and heathers and dusty stone paths.  Warm breeze in the heathers, iron-red stone breaking the mat of grass.  And I saw a red kit below us, lazily quartering the valley, turning sharply on the thermals, until it turned into the sky and disappeared.    

Devil Birds

One sign of the returning summer is the return of the swifts.  Not as common as they used to be, but still I think I have seen them everywhere I have lived. Or rather I did once I became aware of them, and especially their unearthly screaming as they hurtle around the houses in courting and hunting packs.  I found out recently that not much is known about them, and I was reading in 'Nature Abounding' (a collection of natural history writings pub'd in 1943) that the birds sleep on the wing at great heights, and only return to 'earth' in the mornings; even so they are far above the tallest buildings and trees.  And this was confirmed by Springwatch this month, the swifts leave their nest as fledglings and will not return to dry land for up to four years.  To them the physical earth is the smallest part of the world.  

I associate them with the summer, the return of the summer, and inevitably with holidays.  I remember them in Amsterdam and Harlem, and especially out over the river Indre in France.  I sat for a lazy morning reading and watching the birds over the town and the river below me, watching great balls of swifts feeding first over one site and then another as the insects moved and rose in the air.  And I spent a whole summer, it seems now, watching them over Sydenham in south London, the long hot summer of 1996 where I had nowhere to go and spent it in the garden; the distant rumble of traffic, the wind in the trees and the occasional bleat of a sheep from the school grounds where they had three sheep and some chickens. And overhead and around the houses that weird, terrifying shriek of the swifts.  No wonder they used to be called devil birds.  

Black and Gold

Cooling now at 10pm, dusk, the air full of sheep bleating and the occasional rush and scream of the swifts.  A fine sunset, gold-pink and pale blue and vast and free of clouds; another warm clear day tomorrow, hopefully.  We watered the garden as it has been so dry.  We had made a small flower arrangement of grasses and elder flowers, which in the last week has dried out.  The grasses have dried white-blond, as have the dumped cut grasses in the trugs, but the elders have dulled and dried to gold and a deep greeny-black, as if shot through with the gold, an astonishing sight.  And we forcefully trimmed the lavender to make them bushy and stronger.  My fingers smell of lavender from the crushed stems and leaves, the oily essence of the plant.  

Hampshire, 1778

'The elders, water elders, wild guelder roses, foxgloves and other solstitial plants begin to be in bloom.  Blue dragonflies appear,'  wrote Gilbert White in 1778.  We have seen dragonflies but not many, and have no water elders - perhaps they are called something else now.  But the other plants he mentions we have in abundance, especially the pesky, pretty ground elder.  Wild roses are appearing in the hedges and the garden, and the top of the hill has a long line of purple foxgloves, growing seemingly out of the chipped stone itself.  

Lazy Presteigne

A typical lazy Presteigne morning, not bad for a Tuesday!  In town for the doctor's as my hay fever has come back with a nose-blocking vengeance.  This is a real downside to summer for me, and used to be quite incapacitating. On Sunday we were sitting outside with a beer (it was Father's Day) and I could hardly breathe.  Anyway...

So I sat in the waiting room for half an hour then saw the doctor for ten minutes.  I walked into the centre of town beneath great balls of swifts, feeding high over the town and swooping between the houses.  Easily my favourite bird, I love their weird airborne lifestyle, their mystery, their strange eerie shrieks.  A deep blue sky and towering white clouds, pale thunderheads, clean-cut like white ink squirted into blue water.   Ten minutes in the famous 50p Book Room - fond nothing, which is rare - then a chat in the chemists, and one in the newsagent/post office. I posted a book to a friend, Edmund Blunden's 'Cricket Country', a slightly dense text full of the smells of forgotten summers and warm evenings.  A beside-the-river book if ever there was one.  Met another friend in the library and sat chatting with her and her little boy for ten minutes.  Out into the warm streets, more swifts, more astonishing blue skies and towers of cloud.  A walk down to the big house near the river to find the family, and ended up seeing parts of the old house I had never seen, worn floor boards and old cooking ranges, stone flags and warm brick.  Tea and conversation, gardens and houses and children.  

The essence of a lazy summer morning.  Summer can enrich our lives with its slow pace, its rare true warmth and hot sunshine.  And the real summer work rumbles on unseen; it is haymaking time.  

Bright and Sunny

A bright sunny day, warm and occasionally humid, threatening thunder.  We were out in the evening last night, trimming borders and watering.  It is very dry here and we haven't had real rain for some time.  The grasses have responded well to their neglect and have produced seed heads on tall wavy stems.   Over the weekend we collected wood from the hill behind the house, hot stuffy work but it means free hot water and cooking when it has dried out.  The views from the top are stunning, mile upon mile of rolling fields and woods under a thick golden light. Writing about the summer it can pass you by; these last few days of mid-June have felt as though we were living it.  

Ice Cream

Driving somewhere the other day, my head full of daily routine stuff and meal-timetables and family deadlines, I saw a man walking his young son home from school.  The boy was pushing a bicycle and the man was carrying his coat and school bag.  They were both walking slowly, and eating ice creams.  I imagined them talking about the school day, and what was for tea, and what the family's plans were for the weekend.  Everyday conversation and journeys, but as it was summer they were having ice cream.  I realised that observation is not enough, that sometimes we must make the summer happen, and that beyond this we are responsible for making our own happy memories and ultimately our own happiness.    

So yesterday afternoon, after a shopping trip round Monmouth, we drove deep into the woods of the Wye Valley and ate strawberries and yoghurt on a blanket under the trees and read Thomas the Tank Engine stories. Birdsong and the breeze in the trees.  A summer darkness, green and luscious, unexpected sunlight dappling through bright, young, green leaves, only an occasional car passing.  I will not forget that half-hour easily, but I am also determined to make such moments happen again.    

Summer Beers

And something of a festival mood here too, as the pub is having a beer festival with music.  And campers, people camped out all over the common overlooking the valley.  A distant guitar playing, the murmur of singing, gentle and peaceful.  Last night and the night before we had pub rock bands on until 11pmish.  I realised that I am too old or have too much taste to go wild for renditions of 'Alright Now' and 'Smoke on the Water'.  This gentle, almost hesitant guitar music makes it a mellow afternoon; the sounds flow over the hill and fade softly, rather than fight the landscape with electric light and amplified sound.  When it stops - as it just has - it is like a rain cloud's passing, leaving a gentle space where the sound was, a sudden silence.  

Rain on the Longest Day

Warm lazy rain on the summer solstice, the shortest night and the longest day, a turning point. From tonight the evenings will start 'drawing in' - delightful phrase, as if light moves like heavy curtains - until the winter solstice in December, when the nights start shortening again.  But for our friends in New Zealand today marks the opposite point, as from tonight their nights will start shortening again.  A sleepy, invisible, ever-changing pattern of light-fall across a whole planet.  So the earth turns.  

Pictures on the Guardian website from Stonehenge this morning, as hippies and druids and ravers gathered (inside a tight police cordon) to watch the sun come up through the stones.  They towered above the crowds, soft-lit like the temples at Karnak against a dark blue pre-dawn sky, these massive stones older than recorded time.  Too many people for it to be truly spiritual, was the mood here.  But an amazing thing nevertheless.  

French Thoughts

In a month we go to France om holiday, something I have been looking forward to for some time.  But moments of Frenchness seem to have slipped into my summer thoughts.  A bottle of wine and some cheese to finish the meal tonight, a bunch of meadow flowers in a glass on the table; there is a simple, country way of life that the English associate with the French, that northern Europe associates with Gallic Europe; the hope of long sunny days and wine and good food.  A stereotype, of course, a myth, but a powerful one.  All countries' myths are powerful to outsiders.  

But then I found a copy of RH Mottram's The Spanish Farm Trilogy, three novels and short stories about a French farm during the Great War.  The war itself seemed replete with summer; one character after the war remembers birdsong in June 1916, and an image remains of wild flowers and wild birds on the Somme before the stalemate offensive of July 1916.  This is an image of the war itself, connected to innocence lost, peaceful fields before they were blasted to mud and dead trees.  I had never associated the Great War with the summer, always with November.  But then today on a quiet road near Ludlow the wheatfield seemed infested with blood-red poppies, and I realised that I had been seeing them for some time. 

Thick Light

Sometimes these days tumble away full of small moments full of the everyday; garden tools and kitchen furniture bought at auction, a quick lunch, a gloomy heavy rainy afternoon; and then tonight I turned on the stairs and the whole valley was lit by a thick, dusty sun light, golden and heavy, like light fallen from a granary; it made the distant fields seem closer, as if through a telescope or the wrong end of time, long shadows across distant grass.  A summer light, weighty and ancient, the link with summers past.

I am starting to like the idea of this blog being without images; perhaps it will hone my poetics, push my ability to create pictures with words only. 

Late Light

We have been fooled by the light.  We turn around and all of a sudden it is 9.30, 10 o'clock; a bite to eat and then it's time for bed.  Where did the day go? We have been fooled by how long the days are.  We have no television and use the evenings for gardening, contacting friends, reading.  Half a conversation on the phone overheard from the hall, the sound of birds outside, grey clouds floating like bruises on a whit-grey sky; but at twenty-to-ten at night it is still light.  

I love this time of year, although I only half look forward to the summer; perhaps like all  seasons I try and immerse myself in it and try and get as much from it as possible.  Yes, soft fruit and summer pudding!  Olives and tomatoes and meals outside; slower days, longer evenings, warmer nights.

Horus Non Numero

After four days of warm sunshine, this morning the weather changed.  It is still warm but it has rained on and off all day, felt sultry, threatening, overcast; as if waiting for a thunderstorm.  And then at about 6pm the cloud lifted and the sun came out, clearing the air, shifting the clouds.  After a stuffy gloomy afternoon, it feels as if we have been given extra hours of daylight.  

Today we considered the idea of going to a Pick-Your-Own farm and gathering a few punnets of soft fruit; and I thought of Summer Pudding.  The words sound like a full tummy being genially patted.  

And then I realise that it rained heavily yesterday too, and possibly the day before; that in effect I am in summer-time and choosing only to see the sunshine.  I am more positive than I thought!  It reminds me of a Latin tag that I first came across in a James Thurber story.  I can't remember anything of the story but the phrase has stayed with me - horus non numero nisi serenas.  I think it's spelled properly!  It was inscribed on a sundial in the story and was translated as 'I count only the serene hours'.  A very summery inscription!

Rose Stories

Bang on time the roses flowered.  Not my favourite plant as I don't like the suburban formality of rose gardens; they seem sterile and cold and over-planned.  But we inherited two huge bushes with the house, and they both flowered in the first week of June.  One is big and blowsy and pink and ruffled; like a can-can dancer's knickers.  It has mottled leaves and blackfly. The other one is enormous and has hedgerow-rose flowers, small and simple and plain white.  It has no blackfly and healthy leaves.  This is the one we will keep.  From the kitchen window tonight I saw the gnats dance in the sunlight, the evening light over the Radnor Forest, through the leaves. We have also inherited a smaller suburban rose in the garden and a couple of pink-white hedge roses in the boundary hedges.  And this afternoon a gardening friend brought us a small cut rose; they found the plant in their garden, white flowers ageing to pink, slightly ruffled but small, tight, simple.  They had a rose expert in to identify it and he could not; this is how plants die out and are rediscovered, ancient varieties found by gardeners in overgrown gardens, massively visible for June and then invisible for the rest of the year.  

And this evening we planted up twelve strawberry plants, a gift from Devon friends up here house-hunting; good friends I am fortunate to have known for twenty years, suddenly!  

Grasses and Flowers

The hedges have erupted and the top lawn has become a rough meadow, grass growing romantically through our outdoor chairs.  I cut it deliberately roughly, to allow the small flowers room to grow.  The grasses are long enough to produce golden seedheads, and the space is becoming a carpet of ordinary flowers; going-over dandelions, buttercups, daisies, and the small purple flower I have not yet identified.  

But the bank alongside the house - also left wild - has become a garden of hawk-weed, tight fiery yellow-red flowers on slender shaggy stems rising through the grasses.  And last night, going to close up the chickens in the last of the light, they had all closed up for the night and almost disappeared into the long grass.  

I feel strange not being able to supply images to accompany these words, as if this is only half the story.  These journals should be like scrapbooks, I think, rather than diaries or books of poems.  Perhaps after three completed and the last one started I have finally found the right formula!

A Season of Moments

Summer seems a season of moments and slowness, more than any other.  To fully appreciate the season I need time and peace and quiet, to be fully aware of the passing moment.  Sunlight on the pale underwings of a buzzard, turning high over the Gore woods; a goldfinch feasting on the seedheads of the mountain cornflowers.  Even very small events seem suffused,drenched, with summerness, with summer-light; a pleasant conversation with a new friend in a warm rectory garden, turning a child's spade over and over in my hands, then putting it back in the paddling pool as we moved off, the water cooling as the shadows lengthened and the spade moved into shadow, seemed inescapably summery.  

The First of the Strawberries

English strawberries have appeared in the shops.  Ours this week came from Staffordshire. We had some for breakfast, which we managed to eat outside; a still morning, warm and sunny at 8.30, the bank alive with bees and insects.    I am developing a taste for strawberries; we had some juicy ones today but yesterdays were slightly sharp, a sweet and thin taste; as if English sweetness is hard-won, difficult to hold, elusive.   

When I was about 10 I would go to Nottingham with my mother to drop her sister off at a friend's house, where she would stay for a week or so.  I remember how empty the roads seemed, especially if we set off very early in the morning, we seemed to drive through great empty stretches of sunlit Cheshire.  On the way back if we were lucky we would buy strawberries from a stall at the roadside - there are lots of stalls here even today - and the smell from these one or two punnets of fruit seemed to fill the whole car. Sunny, empty roads and the smell of strawberries - a vision of summer.  

But still no sign of the camera!

Summer Rains

Rain in summer has a different smell than winter rain.  The kitchen this afternoon had a fresh, watery-green sort of smell, clean, cold, almost crisp. Yet the rain seems colder in the summer, perhaps because I expect it to be warmer.  I am reminded of travelling to Runcorn when I was a teenager, the sense of wet darkness to the hedges, overgrown and shaggy.  Dark places, full of summer glooms.  I have always understood the Green Man myths.  

It has rained on and off for some days now.  I was in Kington this afternoon trying to squeeze a water butt into the car, with no luck.  The garden is sodden and every bucket is out collecting water.  Then this evening the clouds cleared and there was a vision of far away clouds, brilliant white, like the distant Himalayas.  

Moods and Flowers

Colder these last few days, cold enough to relight the woodburner in the hall.  We have had torrential rain and then sunshine, and the grass needs looking at.  The wild flowers along the bank are changing all the time, dandelions giving way to buttercups and now hawkweed, fiery orange-red flowers on shaggy stems.  White foxgloves in the garden, the allium is flowering, the lithodorum, the aquilegias.  We have a lot of flowers but they are spread out and not in beds or borders as clumps.  There are a lot of small purple wild flowers as well that I haven't identified.  

Cold days in summer are a strange thing, more common than I expect and every time it takes me by surprise.  The rooms have a chill to them, and short sleeves are out for the moment.  

Lake District Weather

We spent yesterday afternoon on the hill behind the house, clearing fallen and felled wood for firewood.   Paul cut the logs into manageable chunks and I hauled them up the hill in the wheelbarrow to the trailer at the top. Backbreaking work but the views from the top were magnificent, two or three miles down the valley to Kington, the broad back of Hergest Ridge, the slopes of Herrock Hill, even (on a clear day) Brown Clee Hill on the far side of Ludlow, which must be forty miles away.  But yesterday wasn't a clear day, it was wet and blustery and fitful; as if the weather was unable to make up its mind, or tired and edgy like an up-too-late child. It wasn't cold, just wet and windy, and reminded me of working in the Lake District many years ago, perhaps because hauling wood was one of the jobs then too.  And coming down off the hill to a stone room full of drying boots and dripping wet-weather gear in front of the small fire seemed very Cumbrian too.  I must find a camera....!

A Time of Heavy Green

In the last few weeks the countryside has blossomed.  The hedges have thickened and gone shaggy, the grasses we have left in the garden are a foot tall.  All the trees on the hill are now in full leaf, even the ash trees which were the last to bud.  There is a heavy green darkness to this time of year which I love, reminding me of overgrown verges, linear meadows, unvisited wild spaces; perhaps the contrast between this benign neglect and the hard road surfaces is the same as the contrast between summer heat and summer cool, urban heat and urban wild space, hot/cool dark/light on a landscape scale.   I must find a way of recording this visually.

The rain has eased but the air is full of water, the garden still, the only sound a tap-tap-tap of water on a metal cover somewhere.  

  

Ancient Dances

A soft knock on the door as it started to get dark at 9.30 or so.   It was Jennie from the pub, gently apologetic, talking softly because of people asleep upstairs.  There were Morris dancers in the bar, preparing for a performance.  

This was an astonishing spectacle.  Away from its folk festival setting and out on a hillside in the dusk - even near modern buildings and cars - the Dances seemed ancient, Pagan, magical; a blur of dark legs and white shirts, the soft sharp susurration of leg-bells, the hard thuds of boots or clogs on the ground and sticks banged in wooden rhythm.   The bearded dancers looked like Victorian working men on a night off or on their way home, in tall black hats, black trousers, white shirts and braces.  The hats were crowned with wreaths of wild plants which filled the pub with the smells of the hedge-flowers, 'like a florist's', as Jennie said.   Out here it seemed appropriate, fitting, a survival of ancient practice, yet one Dance was called Bastille, so surely must have been written to commemorate the French Revolution of 1789.  

On my way to bed, as the pub closed, I heard the dancers walking home, the bells jingling softly in the gloom, hats of drooping flowers in their hands. Where were they walking to?  No cars, no bus until Tuesday; the idea that they would curl up under the hedge and become part of the greenery again was irresistible.