Summer

Long time, no write, so here’s a catch-up on the summer which bore fruits in the most literal sense like never before. The cherry tree, the apple trees and some sort of red berry tree that we don’t understand, and don’t dare try, have been hunched in agony beneath the weight of the multitude of fruits. Pigeon poo within a mile of our house is purple; every morning throughout July and August, plump birds sat on the relatively undersized cherry tree like some sort of exorbitant, unseasonal and lavishly mechanised Christmas decoration. Our courgettes, in their abundance, were the size of fat arms, the beans like hundreds of arthritic fingers, and the tomatoes, though disappointingly leather-skinned, profuse. The garden also suffered from a very hot spell in July, which turned the lawn into coir matting. Now, in mid-September, it is coming back again, and the balmy Indian summer has tempted out some soft shoots that make it a bliss to walk on. Meanwhile, there are regular Newtonian thuds from under our largest apple tree as the unreachable cookers fall to earth like short-haul cold-green comets.

The summer turned up little that was new. The world of work was uncharacteristically consuming, with hardly a week without some grand project or other, mostly delivered with some languid success or other. The annual holiday, this year a misplaced fortnight in Brittany, was a learning experience. I, now 14, is a determined networker and socialite, known to the entire under-16 population of the semi-urban town that we inhabit. From the moment we set off for the 2 ½ hours drive to Dover, followed by ninety minutes on the ferry and an eight hour drive to Huelgoat, she pined. Her mobile phone had been emptied of its usefulness by mid-month (we fathers impose limits you see, much to our profligate daughters’ chagrin) and the house had no PC (“how cwap is that”, she opined), thereby robbing her of M-S-N-ery. The rain is another matter. The heavens broke as we broke and we spent the first week and a half indoors or under cover. By mid-week 2, the sun emerged and we mild-footed it to the south then north then south coast of Brittany for three consecutive days. I’s mood did improve – whether it was the sun or the relief at not being dragged off to look at sculptural adornments on a gothic façade, I’m not sure.

Three week gap between this and the last sentence and the holiday actually feels like it was OK. They’re a bit like wine or marmalade or Christmas puddings – the best bits out after a while and the less than satisfactory episodes fade into the background.

Now daylight is the remnant of each 24 hour spin as the winter gets nearer, Sunday roasts are back on the agenda and the prospect of a Saturday evening closing in is an idea to be welcomed rather than feared. There is a point in the Autumn when it all seems OK again – the dimmer switch being twiddled downward and the days when the garden goes stationary and what we cut away doesn’t race back in the space of a week. I moved the compost to its new place this weekend, moving the old decaying pile of logs and upsetting a few dozy frogs in the process. The spiders are at full fat now, having dined on Crane flies, which have been pathetically abundant and abundantly pathetic this year – stupid airborn prawns. Billie the cat has been having his fill as well.

Back to Tae Kwon Do tonight after a lay-off for a week. My ageing knee got a knock last week, but has more or less mended. We'll be going for our black tag exams in December and then our black belt exams next year – most likely October, but perhaps April. I’m determined to get there, even if have to hobble.

The office is settling down for the evening now, the rush and hum of the airconditioning more apparent than the voice of my closest neighbours who by now are the accountants down the end, worrying their calculators endlessly. What a life it must be to be constantly asking how much. The fluorescent lights and the apple green walls give this place a sense of anywhere and nowhere and with my senses now attuned to what happens next, Ill close this down, go and sweat and kick for an hour before settling back to look this over briefly and then plant it.