These are the Long Days (on Windmill Hill)

JOURNAL ENTRY

14^th June, Wednesday

“Sun down.
A lone swan swims up the canal.
Serene strokes from strong feet.
Each ripple she makes catches fire.
The goldcrests’ chatter falls silent
And the bank-side grasses blaze
With the sun’s dying flame.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The sky has turned milky with the gathering dusk. The last glimmer of the old moon has sunk below the horizon. This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the night to you wherever you are.

The canal is mirror calm and the yellow irises glow ghostly along the bankside, it’s a beautiful night, so I am so glad that you could make it here tonight. Let us sit a while, while the night deepens around us. Come inside and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

The sun has almost scaled to the yearly height of its arc and, therefore, we can forgive it if its presence in the sky hints a little of pride and self-assurance. All week it has blazed from a sky of Wedgewood blue. Impudent clouds, when they do emerge, being burned off.

It has officially been a heatwave here – in the UK, bureaucratically classified when the temperature threshold for the locality has been exceeded for three consecutive days or more. Generally, that threshold is between 25° and 28° (77°F and 82.5°F). It is a little more complicated than that, but for most of the week, the temperatures here have reached this this point. However, a couple of powerful thunderstorms rode through at the beginning of the week giving us some much-needed rain. The poor bank of ox-eye daisies are looking rather tattered and weather-battered now. There has also been a fairly brisk easterly wind. Warm, but giving much needed air.

The ducks are beginning to gather again. It was a strangely quiet spring for them as nearly all the pairs opted to nest further along the canal. Perhaps, that is not surprising and was actually a very wise decision. From March on, gulls have been circling, as have magpies, rooks not so much, but also kites – until the rooks chased them off. There’s also been an increase of boats with cats here. It seems as if the ducks read the signs well and nested in less visible and accessible locations. But a lot are now returning. A few females, but mostly drakes – who are beginning to look rather scruffy – as tatty as the ox-eyes on the bank! The time of the moult has come – when, losing their feathers, they go into eclipse. Unable to fly, they become the literal sitting ducks. The swans too – at least the pen is – you can easily find her preening spots by the little eiderdown of feathers on the flattened grass. I am not sure how true this is, but I read somewhere that it can feel like a bad dose of flu. When we looked after hens, they certainly did feel very sorry for themselves. Scruffy little gaggles, jab at the boat, or try to catch our eye as we pass the window or the duck hatch. Feathers dowdy and awry. Very different to the sleek and vibrantly handsome colours of the spring. Bless them. I am happy to feed them at these times. They have plenty to eat, but the pellets have additional minerals which will help to get them through these times.

[MUSIC]

TUESDAY MORNING, 5.30AM

Heat rises from the ground with insect wings. The air whirrs and shimmers. The reed-beds flitter ion-charged with common blue damselflies. The grass is still cool with the darkness of night and the earth at their roots is damp to the touch. Goldcrest and wren out-sing each other in a choral duel of beauty. Jackdaws provide their pithy punctuation.

Tiddlers group, like spent matchheads, in a sunny spot where the oak and ash give way to the light. They hang motionless, suspended in a world the colour of cask-aged malt. 

A skipper moth alights from reed to reed, his wings filled with the colours of autumn and firelight. Such complicated wings. They remind me of the paper planes that Ian Davis and Dawsey used to make at school on the odd occasion when we had paper aeroplane competitions. Most of us would adopt the tried and tested old-school construction, using pages ripped out of exercise books and hastily scrawled RAF roundels scribbled with leaky fountain pens onto the drooping wings. Their aeroplanes always won. But none of them would beat this skipper, soaking the morning sun on a thick emerald reed blade under a sky of gathering heat haze.

The snowy hawthorn hedgerows are now glistening with tiny haw berries. Lime green and glossy with their characteristic flattened end that remind me of toffee apples and the rim of toffee that formed at its base and which was so delightful to bite off, before your teeth crunched through the brittle shell into the sharp sweetness of the apple. I still can’t decide whether this tree that kept me company all through winter is buckthorn or not. But it too is beginning to fruit, displaying hawthorn like berries.  

Across from it, what all winter was a tangled languid mass of dog rose. Its remaining fruit, hanging shrivelled and sullenly as brown as dates. But now, what a display! Surely, the dog rose must count as one of the true beauties of the British countryside. Such a perfect balance of delicacy and flamboyance. All those days during winter and spring, it promised me that it would bloom. It promised me the green would return. It promised me these colours under this sunshine. It told me to just trust, not the dead wood, not the limp leaves or the shrivelled fruit, but to trust that all the colour and vivacity of life stored deep within its winter roots would burst out, just as nothing will be able to stop me (when my winter was over) from bursting out with the life deeply stored in the soil of my soul. It is always there, that life, that colour, that fruitfulness, safe below the frozen surface. ‘Look beneath your feet,’ the dog rose and the willowherb said, ‘You are looking for the wrong things and in the wrong place. Look to the soil in which you are rooted. That is the secret of your life and strength.’  

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

THESE ARE THE LONG DAYS (ON WINDMILL HILL)

These are the long days, soft with pigeon murmur, and drowsy with conifer-scent and dove song. The days when time can be held in a small child’s fist and blown in streams of promise across the long meadow grass. Days of skies skirled with swallow and starling starred. The days that yield to the honey bees’ hum and of long shadows that crawl cool over velvet vicarage lawns. Days that are as endless as the stretching sky.

These are the days of dry nights and dewless dawns, when mornings lie warm upon your skin. These are the days when the sun climbs high and drags heavy footsteps across the dusty fields, and the gentle walls of the village shimmer and sleep in the midday heat.

These are the days for revisiting the dog-eared paperback books of the past and for breathing in the perfume of chamomile upon your fingertips. These are the days when the swan is content to sleep among the tall grass and for the tortoiseshell to sun herself on the thistle’s purple crown.

These are the long days, when the world slows down, when nothing is hurried, no energy wasted, when there is time to sit and stare and to lose yourself in another’s music.

For these are the days of the turning; when the solstice is near – the hightide mark of our daylight. It laps deep into the edges of our nights. Not quite the land of the midnight sun, but almost.

For the most part, human-life today is untouched by older markers like these. We tend to be insulated from the shifting play of light and shadows that lengthen and diminish across our years - becoming inured to the different symphonies of mood that sweep across our landscapes and characterise our yearly circle.

‘Carpe diem’ (seize the day) writes Horace. ‘Ἐξαγοραζόμενοι τὸν καιρόν’ (redeem the time) instructs St Paul – a hundred years later – and we think we’ve listened well, but we have missed their meaning. All we have heard is ‘make haste, the time is short. Fill it full with busyness. Stack high the trophies of a good and virtuous life, line the shelves with the silver cups of your successes, for soon it will be too late.’ If ever there was a generation that took seriously Herrick’s invocation of “Gather your rosebuds while ye may,” it has been the last few. We have gathered them on an industrial level too many for an individual to carry. However, in the gathering, we have forgotten to stop to smell the roses that we have harvested. To stop, like the comma and the tortoiseshell, and feel the power of the sun, or the magpie – in the high canopy – silent, stationary, as the world goes on below her. Or the piebald on the hill, knee deep in the long grass, gazing for hours down the valley.    

And so, we have chosen activity and busyness instead of a life deliberately lived and deeply lived. A redeeming of time that would also result in the redemption of ourselves. The rest of this turning world does not make such a mistake. It knows that the feel of the sun on the back, the silent companionship of others, is not time wasted or squandered – it is time lived well and to the full. Unlike us, they know that hours are to be lived and not a commodity to be counted and accounted for.    

Starlings share their perch with the sparrows and soak up the sun in their wings and doze in the soft droning air. Kerbside, a blackbird, eyes closed and beak wide open stretches the dusky umbrella of her wings in the sun’s full glare, as if in a trance. And the only sound is bee hum and the cry of ‘love-40’ from the village tennis courts, even the sheep are silent.

And it is not surprising; these birds have been awake since 3 this morning and, if the skies remain clear (as they bear every indication of being), they will still be awake well after ten tonight.

These are the days when our eyes are opened. Look anywhere, even in the most unlikely places and you’ll see gold. In Winter, the rain soaks down here into a slurry of glutinous mud (after the ice age it formed a huge lake that went up to Birmingham and each winter that lake tries to return). It is a place to slog through as quick as you can, missing the debris of the dog walkers’ labours; collar up, head down, boots heavy with clay. But at these times, even here, there is joy. There is something so magnificently extravagant about the common things.

The verges and hedgerows fill with the lacy parasols of cow parsley; each floret, tiny, delicate and overlooked by all, save those to whom it is important. 

This seems to be the year of the buttercup. They form deep yellow clouds on the emerald skyscapes of the distant hills. Deep and rich, promising cool moisture in the simmering midday heat. Make me a bed here on this hill of buttercups deep – as cool as linen sheets – and I will sleep content.

On Windmill hill, the grasses play in the wind that comes all the way from Banbury Town, and Epwell in its shaded dell. And oh, what grasses they are! Grasses to delight the eyes of the little girl who once came to collect them for fairy food and to store them on her bedroom windowsill in a jam-jar, through which the sun of childhood still pours.  And they are still here, just, as inside a young woman, that little girl still lives. Fescue and foxtail, dodder and sedge, dog’s tail and melic. And yet they still remain a mystery – a wonderful puzzling mystery, like the rest of these meadows, like the clear blue horizon, like my life.

 There has been a windmill standing on this spot since the 1300s; alone to the clouds, braced to the winds that storm and chase, to the hawk’s shadow and the vixen’s cry. A solitary hunched figure, watching time pass through the village streets below. And from this door, the clouds and the winds were read. And from this door an older world was lived. The door is now shut and bolted, but behind it, the great wooden cogs that drove the millstones still lie – still, patient – waiting to catch the draught of the laughing wind through the grass and the lark blown sky.

 And banks of clover court the bee and butterfly. But they wait for the cool of the evening or the moist morning dew to release their scent for me. The hours when the bats claw the sky, school-ink blue, and the far-off cattle eat sweet grass under the summer stars.

 And these are the days when children are allowed to play in the evening cool, long after their bedtime; finding their place in the real world – encountering wicked moths and the startle of the swooping bat and the arc of a swallow in the evening sky.

And the shadows fall long across the tennis court; plimsoll on tarmac, poc of ball on racket and “good shot, there!”  And the church bell practice at St Mary’s (every Wednesday at 8 o’clock) with its ring of 6, trips through its rounds and dances to the clink of Pimm’s and lemonade.

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