Summer, hot, roasting, blue-skied, outdoors summer has been very late this year. I feel sorry for all the children and teachers starting their first term now it’s September after a summer holiday which has been cool, rainy, dull and often quite miserable. I feel sorry for them because suddenly it’s roasting hot, dry and sunny and (for us who are free from the daily grind) glorious!
I’m sitting here, it’s late and the window of my little writing room is wide open, and a pleasant, cool breeze is beginning to relieve the stickiness of another hot night. The village is quiet, but there’s the occasional sound of a car on the main road on the other side of the meadows – sometimes there are a couple of cars as boy racers scream through the night. Of course they could be girl racers, pedal to the metal, heading out of town well over the speed limit. A motorbike is droning along the main road now and beyond the road is the railway line. At this time it’s usually long freight trains rattling along, clackety-clack, clackety-clack, endless wagons filled with goodness knows what. There are the occasional passenger trains, zooming along, sounding their mournful whistle – and I can’t help thinking of one of my favourite songs ‘Midnight train to Georgia.’ Right now there’s a plane directly above us, beginning its descent to Bristol airport, I wonder where it’s coming from, maybe it’s full of sleepy holiday-makers, maybe it’s a positioning flight, maybe its freight.
I have a visitor,a crazy moth, crashing around. If it stops for a moment I’ll gently catch it and put it back outside. We used to get may bugs, aka cockchafers, blundering around, crashing into the window and occasionally flying in through the open window. I haven’t seen, or heard any for a couple of years – ditto daddy-long-legs, aka crane flies. Occasionally we have the odd nocturnal seagull, who cry out mournfully in the dark – I think these are probably young ones who haven’t made it to wherever the older ones are roosting.
I’m supposed to be thinking of the next writing group challenge, I’d promised myself I would do it in plenty of time and not the night before, I have another two weeks before we get together,, but I always think I have plenty of time and then it dribbles away. When I say the next challenge, that is actually it – to write on the topic/subject/prompt “next” – which is indeed a challenge.
PS A seagull has just made its presence felt with a loud squawk.
Lois Elsden 