An August-coloured Evening

JOURNAL ENTRY

15th August, Tuesday

“Chasing clouds and sunshine.
The ground still wet from yesterday's rain
We walk the loop, Maggie reacquainting herself
With familiar places.
Me too. It seems a while.
It's good to be out again.
The air smells green and fresh."

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into a dark August sky, moonless and starstruck, to you wherever you are.

It's the night of a new moon tonight or would be, if you could peep over the northern horizon to where it lies. The night holds its breath and the canal is glassy. There's still some traces of light in the sky, but later it will be velvety - perfect for watching the Perseid shower. That is if the growing shimmer of haze a cloud veil stays away. 

I am so pleased you could come; I was hoping you'd be here. The kettle is on, so come inside and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

For the last couple of weeks since I last spoke to you, life has been a little chaotic and unplanned. If you are on social media, you might have seen that I have not been well. It all started… well I THINK it all started when Maggie had her first fall into the canal (so far, the only one). We’d had a fairly long day with one of Donna’s old work colleagues and her family and Maggie was absolutely exhausted (and not the only one!). I was about to take her for her last walk of the day when, I think, she just forgot she was on a boat – instead of jumping down onto the bank, she simply stepped off the stern, lost her footing and plunged straight into the water – which, actually, considering we had trouble mooring up there on a previous year due to low water levels, was surprisingly deep. Fortunately, Maggie was wearing her harness which has a large handle on it and I could easily pull the rather startled Maggie out and onto the bankside. However, in all of this, I was aware that the initial splash and subsequent flailing attempts of doggy-paddle (together with copious amounts of post-plunge shaking) meant that a certain amount of the canal ended up in my mouth.

From our days kayaking, we’ve always been alert to the dangers of Weil’s Disease – a rather nasty and if untreated in its severest form potentially fatal infection. It is caught by coming in to contact with water contaminated by rat’s urine. Anyone who regularly takes part in outdoor water sports is (or should be) aware of the risk posed by Weil’s disease. I have to point out that it is also very rare and the likelihood of catching from simply being splashed (even by a surprised and then exuberant Maggie) is very low. Nonetheless, Donna suggested that we just make a mental note on the slight off-chance that over the next week I start feeling a little feverish.

I was in my office the following Tuesday (a couple of days later) and I began to feel annoyingly tired. I felt fine, but irritatingly sluggish. Fortunately, I had a couple of meetings that meant that I could keep active (and upright), but trying to work at the computer was enraging, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. When I got home, the sluggish tiredness was so all encompassing I ached from head-to-toe. Added to that I felt distinctly shivery and unwell. The next morning, Donna took advice, which was get him to see a doctor immediately. I have to say, looking back it seems all a bit of a nightmarish, delirious, blur of absolute incapacitating tiredness, nauseousness, and feverish aches. Generally, I can be fairly stoic when it comes to illness, but for the first time since I was a lad, I didn’t get out of bed for three days. And, it wasn’t even fun! At least when I was young, I had stacks of Whizzer & Chips, Giggle, and Look & Learn comics piled on my bed!!

Well, the long and the short of it is, I am now beginning to feel a whole heap better. Thank you to everyone who posted lovely ‘get well soon’ comments. Sorry, I didn’t respond, I literally did not have the strength to do so, but your words were (and are) very much appreciated. I’m still feeling a little bit wobbly, but my strength is returning and I am now more up than down. I still don’t know what exactly it was – whether Weil’s or just a nasty bug. But whatever it was, it really took it out of me. It also meant that we had to postpone by one week our visit to see Dad. I didn’t want to miss another week and so hence me being here recording this rather rushed episode a bit out of kilter with the usual podcast routine to get it all recorded and mastered before we leave to see Dad!

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

AN AUGUST-COLOURED EVENING

There is something singular about August that marks it as being very different to all the other months. It is difficult to put your finger on it. Of course, there is its association with holiday that, for those in the UK at least, is embedded from childhood. Even though the traditional summer holiday trips to the seaside, with its buckets and spades, sticks of rock (sticky, pink, and minty), picture postcards and sand may now be dreams of a distant past – and I am aware that even for many of my contemporaries they were only stuff of fiction and stories told in school assemblies. Summer is August and August is summer – even though the shifting paths of shadows and the hedgerows whisper otherwise. For many reasons, we’ve not taken a holiday in August for years – tending to opt for June or July or even pinning a hope for an Indian summer in September. But August still retains that strange feeling of being special.

I know I say this every year, but its weird. The fires of late summer are igniting along the hedgerows; haws, hips, scarlet pokers of cuckoo pint, the indigo purples of blackberry and elderberry. The hazels are heavy with such a bounty of nuts – still creamy green – but already a banquet in the wilderness for squirrel and mice. Harvest time is here and, this year, it is overflowing.    

One or two of our dawns recently have been attended with the restless whisps of mist. It’s the first year for a long time that the pasture land and grasses have not become burnt brown and desiccated, but remained green, and the recent heavy dews have been lovely, but even here there is the distinct feel of a wheel turning. But this year, I am trying something different.

I am trying to calm my natural tendency to cling to the summer in the Augusts of my imagination and to resist the gently flow of autumn. That feeling of denial – no this can’t be. Summer has only just come. Don’t take it away from me now! 

This year – I’m trying to stop holding on. To let the wheel spin within me as freely as it does across the landscape here. Yes, the colours of autumn are smouldering in the dark hedges, but the cloudscapes are still those of summer. Building castles of cumulus, snow-white and billowing like a galleon’s sails. Their flat bottoms, iron grey. Signals of unstable air. We haven’t had much stable air this summer. We.ve not had many of the flat – sterile, milky-blue skies of the last few summers and, although, compared to those on the continent or elsewhere in the global north, our summer has been rather mixed. But I’ve enjoyed watching these nephrological giants climb and sail; the skyscapes of my childhood.

The message of August has always been, ‘Yes, autumn is on the way, but not quite yet. I’m still here for a little bit longer. The summer, warm and gold, within me is still here and I am not going anywhere yet. Let the fields and woods ripen and colour in their harvest glory. It’s time to play.’ Let those almost imperceptible, barely noticed changes come.

Tove Jansson, artist and author probably best known for her creation of the Moomins, summed up perfectly this sense in her chapter ‘August’ from her classic The Summer Book.

[READING]

What can capture this peculiar quality of August better than sharing one of those rare jewel-times of the year that somehow can creep up unexpected and live forever in the memory of future summers and winters, the long dusky shallows of sunshine and gnat-haze, the calm of a glorious August evening?

An evening like this one. The sun’s fire westering low over the heaped tangle of hazel and ash in a sky a-swirl with saffron and ochre. The wind, bullish but warm, tumbles and rolls up from the south, feathering the surface of the canal with scallops and dimples, so that the breasts of the ducks – on their evening patrol – are pearled and crystalline as they swim towards us. This is a wind full of Oxfordshire music and thrush-talk. Erica is all a-dance this evening. She creaks against the rub of fender and rope; half toad croak, half schooner groan.

Listen. Against the tide of wind flurry and bluster, roll the bells of St Peter. Edging into hearing and then ebbing away. Loud, soft, as the wind chooses. Fortissimo, pianissimo. For the wind is a musician too. Rolling those rounded tones around the jackdaw heckled sky. There are times when I think that the ringers have stopped, but no – listen carefully – it is just the tricks of a southerly wind tossing notes and changes into the chapelled sky of an August evening. Teasing and playing them across the meadows and cow-sweet pasturelands of south Warwickshire. Shakespeare country.

The southerly wind takes within its fists these golden carolling notes and tosses them rolling over hill and dale, forest and farmstead as it did when Shakespeare knew these very bells. Who knows who else will hear their song tonight? Over what villages will these notes fly?

“Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillboro, Hungry Grafton,
Dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford,
Beggarly Broom and Drunken Bidford.” 

A piece of doggerel one commentator wrote. If Shakespeare did write it, then I am glad that he too could write good doggerel. Doggerel that fits so perfectly within the softness of a golden August evening.

The skies are so clearing of their feathered folk. The rooks and crows have already clapped their way to the galleon masts of their roosts – as warm as desert sand in the last embers of the day. A few swallows scythe low. They will soon be joined by clatter and spatter of bats until the two become almost indistinguishable hawking the dusky night. I wonder what the ducks make of them, flitting low and swift across their waters. They seem not to notice, but they must be aware of them. 

The somnolent murmur of wordless voices, as drowsy as bees’ hum drift on the edge of hearing. Soft evenings like this have been a rarity this year. Everyone – or nearly everyone – is out. Taking advantage of the weather. A warm dry spell. Catching up with the list of summer jobs written and discussed at length on winter nights when the stoves glowed hot under an ice of stars. A spot of painting. Water has a particular smell in the evening it is not like seaside ozone, but just as distinctive. It catches the nose. This evening it sharpened by the oily-tang of varnish; golden-syrup thick, and just as silky.

And so, I’m enjoying the feel of a fleeting sun, the chase of cloud shadow across the valley, the ping and peep of swallow call, the play of long grass, dry and warm, against my legs and arms; the shifting shades and tones of a passing summer. For this is what it is to be on this tiny spinning globe of constant movement. Hold it lightly and enjoy the flow between your fingers, this August evening of lullabying voices and lazy busyness. An evening soft with summer and rich with the promise of autumn. An evening washed with golds and darkness and church bells. Let them chime out across this special August-coloured evening.

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG