...and it's hot...

London is baking under a brilliant blue sky; summer arrived a couple of days ago, knocking most normal humans flat.  indoors, the temperature is 29 degrees - that's just below 80 F, for those of you on old money - and compared to out in the sun, indoors feels cool.

Luckily I knew it was coming.  What a great institution the Met Office is; accurate weather forecasts have not always been with us, after all.  Gods bless them and their weather satellites!  I was able to get to bed reasonably early last night and get up fairly early this morning.  It's now ten to two, or thereabouts, and I have washed a load of clothes and hung them to dry, and been into Brentford to go to the supermarket and the street market (for the excellent fruit and veg, if you're curious, as well as a chance to practice self-denial over a lot of temptations for foodies like an olive specialist and a stall from the Old Maids of Honour tea-rooms).  I've lugged back my week's groceries and veggies and brought my washing in again; it had dried in not much more than an hour.  I've baked four spinach and feta pies and braised some baby carrots and broad beans in lemon butter sauce, and cooked a big bag of fresh gooseberries.  I've had some lunch; and now I'm free to have a quiet afternoon.

Yesterday too I stayed in and took things quietly.  I finished reading "Wolf Hall" (superb) but then I got so hot and dopey I ended up having a siesta, and I may do the same this afternoon too.  But I'd like to get some writing done.  With the help of a lot of cold drinks.

I also want to paint my toenails; since I have no intention of wearing anything but sandals on my feet in this weather I may as well have coloured toes.  No-one's looking at my feet, I know, unless perhaps it's to wonder if they are the smelly ones; but it pleases me to have nail varnish on, anyway.

I finished the writing up of "Gold Hawk"; did I say that already?  I managed it, with a final push, by the story's first birthday, middle of last month.  It does still need some further revision; my dear beta-reader the DipGeek has given me some very useful feedback, and the last chapter needs to be tweaked a bit more.  But I'm not too disappointed in it.  It was never meant to be a work of any literary merit, but an adventure story and a piece of fun.  So if anyone reading it enjoys the story and roots for the characters, my work is done.

Now I'm neck deep in several short things all chugging along at their own pace, hoping to get one or two of them finished and make a return to one of the longer stories that have been in abeyance for a while (yes, there are several of them, too).  I'm no nearer finding an agent, no nearer being published anywhere except online, but I'm writing fairly steadily and I'm happy with that.  The Muse in her capricious way has given me a lot of stories to juggle at once, and I'm not a natural juggler, but I'm doing my best.  Creativity comes and goes, and I have always found that the best thing, if you possibly can, is to run with it...

Rainy day in August...

For a lot of today it has rained; there was a let up at about 2pm, then another dribble just after I’d had a walk, which was good timing. It’s now looking as though it may pour again, just as we get to going-home-time. I mustn’t grumble, as it’s much needed, which seems bizarre when one considers what a wet summer we have been having. But the wet weather ended two weeks ago and there has not been a drop of rain since, only stifling heat and high humidity. So this is doubly welcome. It waters the Gardens (and everyone else’s gardens too, of course, including mine!) and it brings down the ambient temperature slightly. I went out at lunch and walked with real pleasure in the wet grass.

Rain brings out the subtle scents of lavender and myrtle and escallonia, and the distinctive and delicious perfume called “very-dry-ground-now-wet”, as well as the rather less delicious first autumnal whiff of wet dead foliage. Sweet rain, blessing unlooked for, that washes and refreshes everything, and calms the frazzled mind, and cools the besandalled feet...

Lammas

It's Lughnasadh, or Lammas; the beginning of autumn, the season of the reaper, but also the time of first fruits. I'm working on drafting a pitch letter for "Ramundi's sisters", and tonight I go home to eat my first home-grown tomato of the year. Writing the pitch letter is agony, easily my least favourite part of this "trying to get published" lark. Seriously, I'd rather write five love scenes than one pitch. But I'm hoping that first red, shapely tomato will be good. I think some of the chard might be just about big enough to gather, too. Here's to first fruits, and baking hot late summer days, and to remembering the blessings of life as I make my way home sweating gently across the baked, dry grass of Kew Green.

Hot weekend at the hot keys...

Boy, it’s hot. Yesterday was apparently the hottest day of the year so far – I see that today is officially one degree Celsius cooler. It’s a pity it’s so hard to get any air-flow through the office; it’s sweltering in here, and has got increasingly muggy as the day went on. It’s the humidity that gets to me, far more than the heat.

Had a busy weekend; doing all my boring but useful jobs like grocery shopping and washing clothes, and then writing. That slightly weird dream last week, the one that I thought had the germ of an idea in it, has stuck in my brain and got me buzzing a bit; it ties up terribly neatly with an idea I had years ago, and I suddenly want to take it further. I’m making notes and lists, trying to sort out time-scale problems, and working out what research I need to do and what the main problem areas are (the bad guys are cardboard cut-outs at present, one of the male characters is lamentably wet, there are too many identikit tough women, and there’s a vital plot line that doesn’t mesh properly with another vital plotline… oh yes, I’m going to have fun with this one).

I do mean years ago, by the way; I was a teenager sitting on the school bus, drawing maps of imaginary lands… Suddenly one of those imaginary lands has come back to me, and the muse has asked me to look into it a bit more. She's eliminated the dragons, the elves and the wizardry, and the result looks like it is going to be a rather dark non-sorcery fantasy. God know what genre that is officially. Who writes fantasy without any magic at all in it? Is that still fantasy?

I must be mad embarking on notes for another story – I have two things on the go already, and am still tweaking “The Eternal Love of Gabriel Yeats”. Perhaps I am one of those tyro writers who’ll never be ready to show her work to anyone; I’ll just keep writing away and piling up manuscripts in my shed - or in the nook between the hi-fi and the nick-nacks drawers, which is where they’ve all gone so far (apart, that is, from the ones stuck on my ancient laptop, where the revised “Gabriel Yeats” is currently sitting).

Ah, but I love it. I love it as the only end of my life. Making something where nothing was before – whether it be lines on paper where no drawing was, or a story where no story was. It’s the magic of creating.

Summer Solstice

Midsummer’s Day; a strange, haunted, grey-skied day with an aura of brooding. Not a menacing brooding, I’m glad to say, but a tension is palpable in the air. It is as if something is coming, but something that is as yet not fully formed; something beneath the surface, hesitating in the sweltering air as it strives to find expression.

I sip my green tea with peppermint and wonder at it. Is this the beginning of a new phase, or the hovering on the brink before a fall? It is midsummer, but not a midsummer of dewfall and roses; one of sweat and muted light. Solstice means “sun standing still”, and it is that standing still I feel I’m sensing, that pausing of the whole world, as if in doubt, or before something is brought into being.

Stillness at midsummer;
On the cusp of the seasons,
The wave-crest
Edging over to break
And, breaking, change.
Things unsuspected
And things longed-for, both
Will come, if the gods
Will it; meanwhile we
Carry on, here beneath
The grey heavens, waiting
For the storm to break
Or for joy to break through
As the magic of the future
Becomes present magic now.

In all likelihood my emotions are a purely psychosomatic response to the heat and the humidity today. I half hope so, and half hope not. Like that enchanted Christmas Eve feeling in childhood, there is something inherently thrilling about sensing one is on the eve of some event. Only, it would be nice to have some idea of what the event is to be!

Going home now to do some sewing – three pairs of my summer trousers have all sprung holes at the same time, so I’m patching madly, as I happen to like wearing trousers…

Too darn hot...

The 'fridge at work is on the blink; between last night and this morning, my half-eaten tub of hummous went off, developing a strange new taste and an oddly unpleasant pétillant quality. I was left to make a lunch of toast and black olives. Luckily in this heat my normally very healthy appetite fails and falters, or I would have felt slightly hard-done-by.

Going home to sweat in a different building from this one...

Still sticky

...and not getting any better. Another boiling hot day, with a sky like enamel. Traffic roars past over the Green.

It's odd to look at Miss R's pictures of her garden in Oz and see camellias and Daphne bholua in flower, and oranges fruiting; to think of having cool air with an edge of real chill surrounding one in the morning as one steps out of the back door to check on the last of the runner beans; to think of early winter, from the perspective of what Dennis Lee called "the swelter of July".

Ookpik, Ookpik, dance with us
'Till our lives grow luminous.
Feed the headlong green, in case
We do not give it living space.
In the swelter of July
Ookpik soften earth and sky.
Ookpik, Ookpik, by your grace
Help us live in our own space.

- Dennis Lee, from "Nicholas Knock and Other People", 1974.

I adored "Nicholas Knock and other people" and must have memorised getting on for half the poems in the book. I was ten, and feeding my mind was like feeding an insatiable whale - slurp, in goes another ten tons of cultural krill, whoosh, out goes the empty briny, what's next? By the time I was fourteen I had even set the title poem to music, although as I can't actually write music it remains stuck in my head, imprisoned.

I have decided to take this idea of "do something creative every day" to heart - it has worked for me before, I hope it will work again, and even if it doesn't it will still be fun. Last night I did some writing, challenging myself in the process as I was trying to describe a hard frost, on one of the hottest nights of the year so far. Tonight I am having supper with my brother, so by the time I've seen him onto the tube and got home and watered the garden I'll have to find something fairly short and sweet, like putting up some different postcards; or there's always sewing, after all. There's always sewing.

I had a weird dream; in the dream world I had aided and abetted the murder of a former housemate, and had helped to hide both the body and the vehicle in which it had been moved. His remains had never been found, and I had never been able to forget this terrible, terrible thing I had done. I don't mean that I find that surprising - I have no doubt that I would be tortured by my conscience every living minute, in such circumstances as these. But it was a dream, thank all the gods, so it was the product of my brain processing something and putting it into a new form in order to assess and assimilate it.

So I have been trying this morning to connect this with anything - anything at all - in my waking "real world" life, that might explain why I should dream of such things. I've drawn a blank, and I just end up saying "It must be the heat, the heat is getting to my brain." The heat is getting to my brain, and my limbs, and my feet (swelling) and my temper(also swelling) and my heart (aching). It's all the heat, all the heat's fault.

On the which note, let's end with a little weird humour; I just googled "Dennis Lee" and found that as well as the Canadian poet I memorised as a child there is also a chap of the same name who is trying to sell free energy machines; he sounds like the engineering equivalent of Bernard Madoff... It's a mad mad mad world out there.

Hot and sticky on Monday...

Please, mother of life, let it rain.

Susannah came back into the office after her lunch break, announcing “Hey, dragonflies rock!” – she’s been eating by the waterlily pool outside the Jodrell Laboratory and topping up her tan. Me, I cowered indoors all through my break, avoiding the sudden, sweltering heat. It’s too darned hot for me. I’ve taken to wearing my loosest and most floaty clothes, which today means a floppy pink gingham dress that makes me look pregnant and shows off my less than perfectly toned arms. I’ve just been in the ladies’, running cold water over my wrists and the backs of my hands. I’m befuddled enough by the temperature and the mugginess that I got confused by the taps, which admittedly are counter-intuitive – I’ve only been using them for a year, after all – and couldn’t turn the water off at all for a messy, wet, panicked moment.

I read the Geek in The Gambia's accounts of the heat there and know I couldn’t handle that, not unless the only other option were instant termination. Heat and humidity combined really sap me; they wipe up my energy and spit me out like a dead fly. Maybe I'll never see a real rainforest.

To crown it all, it’s turned grey; I don’t even have the beauty of dry, golden-baked Kew Green in the sunshine to look at. It looks as if it’s going to rain; please, goddess, lady of the west, guardian of water, autumn and evening, let it rain.

It rained yesterday – I was out in the garden, transplanting petunias and portulacas into the last of the pots, sweating and filthy in shorts and an ancient suntop, when suddenly there was a little murmur of a breeze, and as I straightened up thinking “That’s often the preamble of rain”, the first drops began to fall. Then more drops. And more. For a good five minutes it went on in this vein, with single huge drops falling one by one, as if the gods were flicking rain at me from their fingers instead of pouring it out wholesale. Each drop struck with a distinct sound – ping if it hit the barbecue, slap if it hit the table, bong if it hit the roof of next door’s shed, a dusty pflutt on the paving, plip if it hit a leaf. I went on working, and the raindrops hit me, too (I also go plip, which is interesting – does this mean I am a plant at heart?). Each drop was cold, blissfully cold; and on striking, each one spread over my skin with a trickly splatter. It was like being licked on the run by invisible, airbourne, slobbery elf dogs.

I came to the last of the pots, a twelve-inch green-glazed ceramic job, and upended it to chuck out the mass of old dead leaves accumulated inside, and got a bizarre shock. It was full of cutlery. Spoons – about fifteen spoons of different sizes and designs – four butter knives (who uses butter knives? - no surprise that no-one missed them), a pair of nutcrackers that look as though something tried to eat them, and a bizarre gadget shaped like a pair of lobster claws, which I think is a fancy beer-bottle opener. The spoons are mostly corroded 1940s and ‘50s EPNS of varying elegance (or lack thereof) though a few are stainless steel. One spoon says “Potosi Silver” proudly on the back – though as it is probably the worst corroded of the lot I am left dubious as to what kind of "Silver" this is. I’ve cleaned and disinfected the stainless steel, as we are short of spoons, but I doubt if much can be done to save the electroplate. But why? – why?!? It was perfectly good cutlery once – why hide it in a flowerpot? People are so very odd sometimes.

Then it began to rain in earnest, and even I was driven indoors, though I held out until I was good and wet. Oh to be in England, now that summer’s here…