Summer

 I love summer.  I love longer days and sitting outside.  I love sunshine and flowers.  This summer is a strange one, living in a rented house amid the uncertainty and stagnation of the pandemic.  Here is a record of a day for when all this is behind us.

I wake naturally, without an alarm at about half past seven.  This is one of the great pleasures and privileges of being older.  After years of being woken by children or the demands of work when the morning was a frantic time of juggling and school bags, of taking the dog out and leaping in the car, using the journey to connect with work, always feeling rushed and on overdrive, these days I wake quietly.  Ian usually gets up first and makes himself a cup of coffee and me a pot of tea.  I drink it quietly in bed, reading the paper on my ipad.  The road where we live is quiet too.  From here we can hear the church bells striking and they might call me to get up.

Going downstairs here is very different from coming down at our old house.  There the outside was always calling with the view changing from day to day and from season to season. I would open the kitchen door to sunshine, rain or wind and judge the day by how far I could see across the valley.

Here there is no real view but still I open the door, take my coffee outside and check the progress of my sunflower seeds, growing in pots, ostensibly for a WI competition but really just to have something to grow.  The back garden here is small, private and sunny in the morning.  I have given up eating breakfast but the habit is strong so I need to find something to do to stop me going onto automatic pilot and making my scrambled eggs so mornings are generally planned.  On Monday morning I will probably go to yoga, on Wednesday Pilates.  Tuesday morning is Spanish time with my friend in Valencia and Thursday morning my online Spanish class.  On a yoga morning we return home at about a quarter past eleven.  I like walking back through the churchyard.  It is strange.  I am not a churchgoer but the sound of the church bells, the path through the churchyard, both make me feel somehow anchored.  It is one of the things I like most about living here.

 Lunchtime almost always involves eggs in some fashion: scrambled eggs, poached eggs, boiled eggs.  I love them all.  At the moment Ian likes to watch the Daily Politics Show over lunch and then the news.  I am having one of my periods of finding politics and politicians intensely annoying: the point scoring, the predictability of party political responses to questions, the fudge, the lies, the lack of honesty.  Listening to it raises my blood pressure and undermines my hardwon equilibrium.  So I will lunch with a book in the dining room or outside only arriving as the news starts to catch the headlines.

Afternoons are often for exercise, maybe some childcare for our locally living daughter, Spanish or Welsh homework and keeping in touch with family.  There might be something to do in the community for book club or WI and we might go to the building plot to see the progress on the new house.  It is surprising that, apart from the quiet start to the day, life feels quite busy.  I think it is partly as a contrast to those periods of lockdown when there really was nothing in the diary.

We eat our evening meal quite early, around six or six thirty.  We try to cook all our meals from scratch and it is surprising how much time thinking about food, preparing food and eating it take in our day!  Evenings are for reading, knitting, watching television and doing the crossword.  Right now there is an enormous amount of football on the television as a result of the Euros. I am not a football fan but I will watch if Wales or England are playing.  

We generally go to bed at about 11.00.  I will read for a while.  Coronavirus has increased my reading time so I am getting through three or four books a week.  I read so fast I barely remember some of them and it is one of the pleasures of book club that it makes me read things I might not otherwise choose and also slows me down because I know I will have to discuss the book.

And so there we are: another day gone.  It is happy enough and shot through with calls with our children and grandchildren which give it connection and meaning.  It might be a bit short of adventure at the moment but adventure and coronavirus don't easily combine.  But the world is still beautiful.  The sun still shines.  One day we will go adventuring again.  I will sit on a clifftop overlooking a blue blue sea.  I will eat food I have not cooked.  I will speak a language which is not my own.  

In the meantime the church bells mark the hours and the days are good.