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.