I know we’re not there yet, but I’m wondering if the end of summer is about to be heralded. It might seem strange to be saying it with the sunny mornings that we’ve been seeing of late and it’s hardly cold, but a couple of cooler nights in the last week have begun to get me thinking.
We had to wait for the summer to arrive this year – and by quite some margin although it’s been anything but the washout that we saw 12 months ago. It seems like only a few short weeks since I had a number of wildlife organisations on the radio programme imploring home owners not to cut back hedges and shrubs for fear of disturbing nesting birds who had themselves had to wait before being able to rear their young, such was the length and depth of the winter. The doomsayers had their annual shot at saying that we wouldn’t get a summer because of the shift in the jetstream, bringing wetter weather to the UK from the south west and that we would forever be getting wet summers – a legacy (that word again!) of global warming.
WONDERFUL SUMMER
And yet look at it. As it turns out we’ve had wonderful summer months so far with plenty of good weather to accompany the plethora of outdoor and sporting events, festivals and celebrations which have punctuated the calendar. I haven’t taken a summer holiday this year although I’ve had a couple of much appreciated long weekends in Spain where it was verging on being uncomfortably hot and temperatures rose well into the 30s. On those brief occasions it was positively refreshing to return to the UK and find long hot sunny days, but not so hot that I had to consciously think about continually applying suntan lotion.
I sometimes wonder if collectively we have very short memories these days. A year ago we celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and revelled in the massive successes of both the Olympics and Paralympics. While there were days of good weather I recall a lot of talk about bad weather – and I certainly remember the drizzle and dampness of the Jubilee celebrations back here at Delapre Park. Contrast that with the superb conditions of a month ago and the excellent Alive@Delapre concerts and surely we have little to moan about when it comes to one of our favourite topics of conversation.
PATRIOTIC DISPLAYS
Last Saturday I was part of the audience for the Battle Proms Concert at Althorp. A huge crowd of us waved our Union Flags, sang along with passion to the classically familiar music and watched spellbound as Spitfire pilot Carolyn Grace displayed her beautiful machine with breathtaking precision to the music being performed a few hundred feet below her. She couldn’t hear a note of it – instead it was all done with timing worked out to metronomic accuracy by stopwatch.
The weather was perfect and picnics broke out all over the grassland both before and during the event. Something different but similar is coming to Sywell next month with Pistons and Props – I hope it is similarly blessed.
So why am I sensing seasonal change right now? Well in my garden there are tens of thousands of seeds which have been dropping on their leafy parachutes for weeks from the trees surrounding it. I’ve raked them off twice already and still they continue to fall. Before very much longer they’ll be joined by what are at the moment healthy green leaves.
Time waits for nobody – and certainly not gardeners.
It’s been a brilliant summer so far – more of the same please!