July notes

I glanced out of Joe’s bedroom window. A Sunday afternoon in mid July: windy but still hot. The clear skies of the morning gone, a billowing, colourless canopy now pinned overhead.

The fields are mostly mown now, the baling’s done and we’ve entered that part of summer where the dry-weather landscape is a faded palette of pistachio, flax and set honey.

But there’s much abundance, too. So many butterflies and bees - the garden hums and dances with them. Huge murders of crows circle above the farmland, occasionally alighting on dry stone walls: long lines of beaky barristers and schoolmasters, cloaked and conferring amongst themselves.