Harvest

I have distinctly felt the first touch of autumn these last two days. Heavy rain chased away the warmer air, and now the sun is back, but we're into another phase.

A vase of flowers from the garden - the first sweet peas (at last), one white, one dark red, frothy alchemilla, a lovely mallow with darker purple veins on its pale lilac petals, penstemon, veronica, spikey petalled astrantia, and something with small dark red flowers I think is a godetia. They are all together in an old milk bottle marked Hornby & Clarke, which L dug up in our London garden years ago.

Still eating gooseberries, dark as plums, tender broad beans, sweet tasting 'early' potatoes whose skins insist on floating off as they cook, nutty flavoured bristly courgettes, strawberries, raspberries, lettuce and mizuna. The runner beans are flowering scarlet on the allotment as they scramble up their hazel wigwam. And we have seedlings of rocket and chard growing on in the cold frame for later crops.

Summer

This summer is rather hard to love. A blanket of cloud of varying colour and density keeps the sun from warming and brightening our days almost every day. Just occasionally, the cloud disperses, the sun shines and the air begins to warm, we sit ourselves outside, apply sun cream, remember what we thought summer was originally intended to mean. These occasions last sometimes more than half a day...

My mother used to struggle with the way weather affected her mood, and be vociferously indignant when it was ghastly! Lowering (pronounced louring) was a word she often used to describe just such skies as we have seen rather too much of this summer. Definitions include dark and threatening, and I think it was some kind of threat that my mother used to sense, or you might say project into these heavy dull skies. And I have become more like her as I have grown older, even as I have deepened my understanding of the early roots of the feeling that is triggered. For me the departure of brightness, the absence of the sun and its warmth, create a perfect sensory metaphor for abandonment, loss, separation, ending. The mood that can seize me - a depressive one, if you will - is one in which all goodness has departed, the best is past, and now only bleakness and doom remain. I try to think of it as theatre lighting, to consider the skill used by its technicians to create mood and meaning by adjustments to the angle, brightness, colour or tint of the onstage lighting. I try to find the place inside me where I feel well, supported and know that I have not been abandoned. Hard work.

Today I have taken garden waste, cardboard and empty cartons to the tip, been to Lidl to buy amongst other things 70% dark chocolate with small caramel chips in it, goats cheese, nectarines and a little basket of single clove garlic. I learned that they do not sell fresh ginger. So I bought some from The Bear, a rather fine wholefood shop nearby, as well as some ground ginger, some fine wholewheat flour and some blackcurrant and apple concentrate. Sliced fresh ginger infused in boiling water is my favourite afternoon beverage and very good for the digestion. Good news to report, since we're on the subject - my gut doing very much better and I think I've put on a pound or so! Certainly eating a whole lot more these last few weeks, and able to enjoy the raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries we have been growing in abundance in garden and allotment. We made ten jars of gooseberry jam at the weekend!

So, yes, summer is still performing some of its expected miracles!