‘It’s three fine days and then a thunderstorm.’ That’s what I used to say to my students in Spain when they asked me to describe a typical English summer. ‘Ah,’ they said, ‘and then three more fine days and another thunderstorm?’ ‘Nope,’ I’d reply. ‘That’s it.’
And so it is this weekend. Yesterday I spent the entire day in the garden, thinking how wonderful it was to have a garden one could spend the whole day in without wanting to scream at the beer cans on the wall or rip up some horrible piece of plumbing or tear out the sheds and start again. It was actually too hot out there and it reminded me of summer afternoons in the vicarage garden with the spire’s shadow slowly sweeping across the lawn. That was some garden: half an acre. Bits of it never got tamed, but it was paradise for us as kids. The garden here faces North and gets the sun on it the whole day, just as the vicarage garden did. I think it faced West; I seem to remember the sun setting over the far wall, but I could be remembering that wrong. Anyway, it wasn’t overlooked by anything apart from the church spire, so there were no buildings to get in the way. There were lots of trees on one side but much of the lawn stayed in the sun.
Stupid wordpress won’t let me comment on my own posts, for some reason – it keeps insisting that I am Mark. I am not Mark: even Mark is not Mark, and I keep telling it so, but it won’t believe me. So here’s my reply to Steve’s comment yesterday: did the gaslighter have a long thing on a stick or did he climb a ladder?
You can comment below – presumably wordpress won’t insist that all my readers are Mark.
Or will it? I think we should be told.
Kirk out
PS Oh! and the cooker fairy appears to have mysteriously visited our house as the oven wasn’t working last night and this morning it is. Spooky!
Sarada Gray 