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.