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.  

A Rain Day

After a week of warm sunshine, the weather changed  - broke - last night with torrential rain showers and then an evening of showers and mists and drizzles.  When I got up this morning I couldn't see the valley at all, the far hills were hidden behind a curtain of white mist.  Everything is dripping and wet this morning.  But we needed it; the water butt was down to 30% full and the ground was parched.  (With a gentle pattering roar the rain starts again.) We have been planting vegetable/salad crops; tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, chard, rocket, basil, mixed salad leaves.  The shallots are doing well and will appreciate the rain.   Paul and I were due to go onto the hill this afternoon to chop wood for the winter, but I don't know if that will happen in this rain.  

The 6am Garden

One cloudless day has led to another and then another.  The forecast is for this pattern to fade and for more unsettled weather towards the end of the week, with rain over the weekend.  We need it, and local farmers too are anxious.  We have had no rain for about three weeks but the old lane alongside the house, overgrown with ferns, grasses and wild flowers, is heavy with dew all the time.  Weather 'patterns' are a beautiful, poetic idea; I love the idea of the weather being 'unsettled' too, as if something so vast, so indifferent, could be uncertain or indecisive.  

We managed to have a couple of hours in the garden last night, planting basil and salads, getting in the last of the tomatoes and peppers.  A beautiful warm evening, an explosion of purples and deep pinks in the sunset over the Radnor Forest.  

I was up early this morning and took a walk around the garden.  Lots of swallows over the church, collared doves calling somewhere, the hedges alive with birds.   Yesterday there was a troop of swifts screaming around the church and over the lower village first thing in the morning; I watched their shadows on the old stone wall.  Swifts feed at different places at different times of the day, following the insects.  We see them here in the evening and the early morning, if we are up early enough.  

Still no sign of the camera - but I will find pictures soon!

A Cloudless Day in June

The first of June and the first entry in my final seasonal journal.  A beautiful day, cloudless, hot, sunny.  We had a shapeless and uneven spring, with cold days and sunny days and frosts quite late.  Summer seems to have arrived slowly, and the warm sunny weather is here in patches, three days here and three days there, and is not supposed to last beyond Wednesday.  But I love the sunshine and will enjoy it while I can.  

Summer is a strange season, possibly the strangest of all.  I find it's richness and fecundity hides darknesses and wet gloom, like the legend of the Green Man.  It also seems the season most full of nostalgia and memory, perhaps because in this country warm summers seem infrequent - but will this change with global warming?  There is also the association with holidays, another source of memory and nostalgia.  But I will also be writing about the garden and the birds - the village is full of swifts in the early evening - and summer journeys here, as well as summers past and urban memories of hot summers in hard cities.  

This morning we drove home the long way and went along the valley to New Radnor, where we turned back on ourselves and turned off at Kinnerton.  A tiny, sleepy village, old walls erupting in wildflowers, a village full of birdsong.  We took the narrow road past Four Stones, one of the many prehistoric sites in the Radnor Valley, and didn't see another car on the road.  Deep ditches full of cow parsley, buttercups and a rampant purple flower I can't identify.  A lovely route, silent and empty and dusty, like a road into the past.