Well, I certainly can’t fault the weather forecasters. For a week, they’ve been predicting today, the last full day of summer, would be dreadful. A distant rumble of thunder followed by a heavy downpour before breakfast. Muggy showers interspersed with muggy mist throughout the day. Lights on at noon. The perfect sort of weather for enjoying Mark Cocker’s latest, A Claxton Diary: short snatches of nature writing in the form of a diary. I wonder if it’s a format that will ever catch on.
As I headed out for the Sunday paper, I was pleased to see our hawthorn hedge loaded with red berries. It’s only a hedge in theory; in reality, it’s a line of trees which has got out of hand. Someone really ought to do something, but I fear it might be too late for hedge-laying. The trees in our ‘hedge’ began life as bird-seeded saplings that took root in various unwise places in our garden. Whenever I came across one, I dug it up, roots and all, and transplanted it in our proto-hedge. Then I forgot all about them and Nature took over.
We took a quick walk around the lanes mid-afternoon. The views were non-existent, and everything felt clammy. Rooks perched on power lines, looking miserable. A tractor was spreading muck on the fields, its distant chugs dampened by the damp. Dreich, the Scots would call it: a word I always assume, no doubt incorrectly, must be a portmanteau of dreary and bleak. And then an incongruous treat: a blaze of light at the side of the track, a white foxglove in full flower. You’re leaving it a little late, my friend.
