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.