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.