...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...

When I am troubled...

When I am troubled I like to walk. Whether it is ten minutes stroll out in the Gardens in my lunch break or forty minutes tramp going homewards, it clears my head and lets me breathe. I feel my shoulders relax and my head go up, my legs seem to stretch out as I move forward, and suddenly I find I can reflect calmly on things that stress me; work falls into perspective, plot problems sort themselves out, and poems begin to stir, and I see colours that make me want to grab a brush and paint for hours. Solvitur ambulando, as someone said, back in the days when they spoke Latin rather than scratching their heads over it - I think it was one of the Church Fathers. He was right, anyway. It will be sorted out by walking.

Today I think I need to walk home; not just for the head-space it gives me, but also because a colleague brought in and distributed some fabulously rich home-made Indian sweets this afternoon. Gajjar Khe Halva, yum; but goodness knows what the calorific value of two slices was.

Yesterday it poured for a lot of the day. My brief walk at lunch was one of pungent wet smells and cold air, my umbrella catching on things, branches reaching under it to slap my face. Today it has turned hot and sunny again and my lunchtime stroll was full of flowers and birds chirruping, and dry, resiny late-summer scents. Most of the time I love the constant contrasts of the British climate, but sometimes I am baffled by them. There must have been a good ten degrees temperature difference between yesterday and today; and the forecast is for another chilly wet day tomorrow…

Off home now to eat warmed up lentil moussaka and get on with the next fairy tale. I don’t know what it says about me, that I’m writing fairy tales at my age. But they are what comes, and I go 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...

Lovely afternoon

It's a lovely day, the best kind of summer weather; sunshine and puffs of snowy clouds, hot but not too hot, with a gentle breeze. I've just been out to buy some vegetables from the Kew Diploma Students, who sell the produce of their veg plots every Friday lunchtime (proceeds go towards funding a field trip). Just as I was raking in my purse to pay for my Swiss chard, purple beans, mangetout, radishes, basil and parsley, one of the students appeared at the sales table carrying bunches of sweet peas, so I added some of them as well. I now have them on my desk in a paper cup of water, and the scent is filling the whole office.

The Gardens are looking glorious, despite the way the weather lately has been veering from drought conditions through hailstorms to torrential rain, and back again. The waterlily pool by the Jodrell Laboratory is filled with floating cups of flowers, and buzzing with dragonflies; the lavenders are all in bloom, and the classic herbaceous borders in the Duke's Garden, just outside our office, are a picture of richness and colour; salvias, heucheras, geraniums, clematis, echinaceas, and great banks of daylilies in darkest mahogany and palest cream.

All that loveliness; and fresh-picked vegetables as well. I shall make a chard and fresh herb omelette for supper, and a salad of steamed beans and mangetout. It looks as though it will be a while before I have any of my own home-grown produce - my chard plants are tiny, ditto most of the tomatoes, and my beans are rampaging up their sticks (& anything else they can lay hold of) and producing masses of leaves, but no flowers as yet.

The last of Cardiff Singer (& possibly the last of the summer, too)

Cardiff Singer is over for another two years, and I am bereft. For a whole week I have had the chance to listen to a bunch of talented young opera singers every night. Some of them were good, some were very good and some were really great. Some were absolutely wonderful. I now have bad withdrawal symptoms.

What a feast of glorious music it has been, and what a pleasure all those hard-working young people were, with their fine voices and their hopes for the future writ large on eager faces. I feel very dull and rather old when I listen to a twenty-four year old with more musical talent in their little finger, and more self-discipline and determination to succeed, than I have in all five foot nine and fourteen stone of me; but I also feel privileged to get to see them in action, so early in their careers, these kids. They are so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and full of delight in everything they do.

The Moldovan soprano, Valentina Nafornitsa, won the Grand Final. My favourite, the Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko, won the Lieder Prize. I would have given him both prizes, but then I do love my baritones. Mr Bondarenko’s song recital was a sheer wonder from start to finish; effortlessly beautiful singing full of subtle, unforced sincerity and dramatic nuance, and with that incredible feeling of intimacy that a great recitalist can bring even to a big concert hall. At last Favourite Baritone has a worthy successor.

I’m going to see if by some miracle I can get a ticket to Glyndebourne next year – he is singing Marcello in “La Boheme” and I go slightly fluttery inside at the thought. As my late father used to say about certain sopranos, “Gulp, I think I’m in love”.

Despite the vital but restrictive necessity of being in for all the Cardiff broadcasts, I managed to get a good deal done this weekend, too. On Saturday I visited a lovely exhibition of modern Australian prints at the BM, and had a mooch afterwards in the minor Greece and Rome rooms – the ones with real things from real people’s lives and homes in – then spent a happy hour in an art materials shop (& didn’t buy anything stupid – just a few sensible things like a new sketchbook) and then in a sale at HMV on Oxford Street (& only bought one thing, a Dvd of “La Fille mal Gardée”), and had lunch out, and listened to a very good Hungarian band busking outside the church of St Martin’s in the Fields, and bought some concert and ENO tickets for the autumn.

On Sunday I sewed; I finally finished the poppy-print top, then cut out, pinned and tacked two more jobs, a plain straight summer frock in panels of two shades of blue, and a blouse I need to let out. Opening the under-arm seams and piecing in extra fabric on either side is a miserable, fiddly job, but I just relax, listen to the radio, and tell myself I am channelling my grandmothers’ spirits. To throw away a favourite blouse, in silk patchwork in shades of chestnut brown and burgundy, that always looked good, simply because I’ve put on so much weight, offends me. Realistically, I’m unlikely to lose the weight, and the sewing practice is good for me, so I’m going to let it out and get some more use out of it rather than beating myself up about getting stout. With the really twiddly parts, the cutting out and fitting and pinning and basting, all done, it’s just a question of mindlessly plying my needle now, and I can do that peacefully over the next few weeks while I watch tele or listen to music.

It’s just started to pour with rain; now that I can go home, it does this. Guess who didn’t bring an umbrella today? Really, after all these years living in my dear wet native land, you’d think I’d be more Great-British-summer-savvy!

It's been a glorious sunny day...

I had a picnic in the Gardens with some colleagues at lunch; we all sat in the sun on the grass bank beside the Slate Towers fountain, eating wholemeal bagels and hummus and tomatoes, and cake (Viv had been baking), and getting somnolent and comfy like a gang of snoozing cats. The first lindens are just coming into flower, and their sweet scent was cascading over us. I really did nearly fall asleep, after having a rotten night last night (I had eaten an entire bar of chocolate, my first chocolate in a month, and was plagued by unsavoury nightmares of crashing cars and fighting off Second Favourite Baritone's creepy Scarpia - I'm sure Mr M-M is a perfectly nice guy who goes home to kiss his kids goodnight and walk his dog, and I guess it's a compliment to how unnerving his characterisation was that I subsequently have bad dreams about it!). Anyway, I managed not to drop off to sleep in the blazing June sun... and now as I set off home it is just a tad cooler so that cycling in it will be a pleasure rather than a toil. Please, dear Lord, please you gods and little fishes, let this really be summer now!