What makes a summer

One swallow, they say, does not a summer make.

It’s pretty hot here, in Valencia as in most of Spain, and yet it doesn't seem to be just the heat that tells me it’s summer. There’s something else, and for some time I couldn’t make up my mind what. 

So I’ve been wondering just what does make a summer.

Not the swallows, I’d say. They turned up here in their masses – I never got a chance to spot the one that didn’t make a summer. Besides, my wife tells me they were swifts not swallows anyway. The swallows showed up a while later and, confusingly, looked exactly the same to me. In any case, one swallow or one swift certainly didn't make our summer, and even the huge numbers that eventually arrived affected our comfort much more than the season.

For a few days before they arrived, we were being irritated by flies coming into the house when we had the windows open. But then the swifts showed up in their hundreds, flying around behind our flat at sunrise and sunset, like vacuum cleaners of the air, scooping up any insect with the temerity to come anywhere near them. The fly problem vanished.

I have a lot of affection for the swallows. Indeed, I’m delighted that the house we plan to move to shortly has a pair in residence and they even have fledglings at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that it’s they who make my summer.

Swallow fledglings in our new place

So, I kept asking myself, what does?

Certainly not the date. How many British residents, including me when I still was one, have enjoyed a glorious, sunny, warm May only to shiver through a dank and cold June?

It wasn’t really the temperature either. It gets hot in Spain. We’ve even had temperatures in the low thirties in Valencia (no, no, that isn’t freezing cold, you poor benighted users of that outdated temperature system), despite the nearness of the sea and the breeze blowing off it. But it’s far worse in Madrid, where I go fairly frequently to visit my sons and their partners (and soon my second grandchild), where the high thirties or even low forties are not unknown.

It took me a while to work out just what it was that made a summer for me. And the enlightenment came in the form of a memory from my distant childhood.

For my first thirteen years, I lived in my native city, Rome. Throughout my childhood, I’d always felt profoundly English, to the extent of experiencing nostalgia for a country I’d visited frequently but never lived in. I remember catching my breath, and feeling a flood of emotion, over a geography book in my (English) school in Rome, when I came across a picture of a typical London street with a sodium streetlamp. My nation. In some sense, my home. Spiritually.

Then my parents sent my brother and me to boarding school in England. One evening some months after that wrenching move, I was at my grandparents’ house, watching TV with them. You know, black and white, and we felt at the cutting edge of technology because we had three channels instead of the two we’d got used to.

The programme was about an archaeological expedition in Greece. I remember nothing about its findings. All that sticks in my mind is a sound. Like the picture of the sodium lamp, it brought a lump to my throat and made me catch my breath.

Cicadas. Grinding away. I could almost feel the heat and smell the pine needles.

That’s summer. Hear that sound and you know you’re out of the grip of the winter and the cold. You know you’re safe in shirtsleeves, and short ones at that. Sunset doesn’t mean a chill that forces you indoors, it means the warmth becomes comfortable and that, even at night, you can sit outside with a drink and enjoy the smells and the easy living.

Just a few minutes’ walk from where we live at the moment (before we move in with the swallows) is the long park that winds through Valencia in what used to be the bed of the Turia river. Right now, it's full of that beguiling sound day and night. Reminding me again and again that summer is here. Just like when I was a kid.

Summer floods the Turia park
Just imagine the cicadas providing the accompanying sound track

It’s as nostalgic as it’s wonderful to hear the cicadas telling me I’m back in a land of real summer again…

War, peace and halcyon days

1975. What a year. The longest, hottest summer I remember in England. I was between two phases of my existence and living at my grandparents’ house – rather overstaying my welcome, I’m ashamed to admit – but finding the time extraordinarily comforting and restful.

The BBC was running an adaptation of War and Peace on television and, in a time before DVDs or catchup, you just had to tune in each week if you wanted to know what was happening. I couldn’t wait in suspense a whole week at a time, so I borrowed my grandmother’s copy of the novel, an Everyman edition in battered red cloth covers which I’ve since inherited. I lay in the back garden surrounded by the vivid green of a lawn I did everything I could to avoid mowing, soaking in the sun while immersed in an extraordinary novel.

Last weekend, the BBC started a new serialisation. I had to watch it, if only out of nostalgia for that time four decades ago. But it left me less than fully satisfied. So I got hold of the Audible version and started listening to it, on the way to and from work, and during my lunch hour, on my phone.

On Audible, the book lasts some 61 hours. The BBC series covers six one-hour episodes. To say that it fails to do the novel justice would be to fall far short of the truth of the travesty if makes of the Tolstoy. It just hasn’t given itself the space to do otherwise. The worst aspect of it? The book presents us with a panoply of characters which is bewildering enough even when they appear to us over a number of chapters. In the telescoped timescale of the series, they’re just dumped on us in a great rush of confusion. It put me in mind of the rather cruel words of the Mossad spy genius Kurtz, in John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. Talking about how two young women could switch identities in an airport, he explains:

“… they go to the ladies’ room, they switch tickets … they switch passports too. With girls, that’s no problem. Make up – wigs – … when you dig down, all pretty girls are the same.”

Without giving way to quite that degree of misogyny, I have to admit that the TV series did have something of that effect on me. The BBC provided a large number of pretty young women actors, but that just left me wondering who they all were. Was that one Julie Kuragin? Lise Meinen? Hélène Kuragin? Or even, I’m ashamed to admit, the key figure Natasha Rostova herself? I had only a hazy idea. And, to be honest, that did make following a complex plot a trifle difficult.

The 2016 BBC version of War and Peace.
Lots of lovely people. But which one is which?

Still, who cares? It’s splendid spectacle. And it’s spurred me to re-read the book, and I really mean read as well as listen: so that I can keep on going at home, I’ve downloaded the Kindle version too, for the princely sum of £0.00. 

Besides, series has reminded me of an idyllic time in my youth. How much more can I reasonably demand of the BBC?

Hesitating summer and a tribute to the woman in white

Summer’s been teasing us this year. It came early in England – or was that a glorious Spring? At any rate, the flowers came out and the trees covered themselves in leaves.

But then it slipped away again, as though it had a better place to be, and left us glum and grey and rain-sodden. Why, we were even cold. We began to wonder whether it had really been there at all, and I had to go back and see the leaves still covering the trees to convince myself that it had.

One day we even had summer to the left,
spring to the right

Now it seems to be sneaking back again. A patch of sun here, a little heat there. And the plants, smarter than we are, have been reacting, growing like weeds (especially the weeds, that poor Danielle has to spend so much time pulling out): they know that the rain was good, though we complained about it, and that sun is coming behind it to make things better still.

But summer hasn’t yet wholly made up its mind to stay with us. The grey keeps coming back, even the occasional pattering of rain. It’s like a child forced reluctantly to visit an aged relative: he’s there, but not really in the company, and can’t wait to get away again.

So it’s comforting to know that it was ever thus, there’s nothing new in this sense that we’re perhaps being cheated by a summer that hasn’t entirely decided to join us. There’s nothing new, either, in the knowledge that in time it will show up and we just need the patience to give it the time it needs.

No one I know sang the seasons better than the woman in white, the glorious Emily Dickinson, back there in Massachusetts the century before last. And, to celebrate the 1st of June and a wonderful poet, here’s how she described this reluctant indecision on the part of summer.

These are the days when birds come back, 
A very few, a bird or two, 
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on 
The old, old sophistries of June,— 
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee, 
Almost thy plausibility 
Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, 
And softly through the altered air 
Hurries a timed leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days, 
Oh, last communion in the haze, 
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake, 
Thy consecrated bread to break, 
Taste thine immortal wine!

Enjoy the summer! It’s on the way.

(My apologies, naturally, to anyone in the Southern Hemisphere)

Everything's fine, in its season

Seasons matter.

For years England has been deprived of a proper summer. Seven years, some say. Well, this year we had one. 

OK, I appreciate that it would barely register as summer for my sons in Spain, where today the temperature dropped to 33 Celsius (91 Fahrenheit, for the benighted States). Still, by our standards England had a real summer: the skies were often blue, and it tended to be warm most of the time, bordering occasionally on the uncomfortably hot.

Having a summer makes the rest of the year so much more bearable. One can put up with a little harshness in January if one’s had some gentleness in July. 

That was a truth that was borne in on me particularly strongly today.

A fine rain was falling as I walked my dog Janka in one of those areas that redeem the often ugly environment of Luton. A stretch of wooded land follows the river Lea and runs into an old orchard, which someone – perhaps the Council – is trying to bring back to its old use, with new apple trees just now beginning to bear fruit, in among the mature ones.

The presence of such a place is magical, especially as it’s surrounded on either side by housing through which runs a major road to Bedford.

In the gentle softness of Autumn, the fruit is ripening

In that setting, the rain mattered not at all. It was the kind that doesn’t really seem to wet particularly, but instead simply creates an atmosphere of softness. Janka certainly seem unfazed, much more interested in the smells in the undergrowth than bothered by the drops. As for me, I was enjoying the blackberries, each an explosion of flavour this year – they too seem to have liked the summer – and when we arrived at the orchard with its branches weighed down with fruit, a couple of apples too.

So what we were getting was a foretaste of the next season. Autumn isn’t quite here, but it’s coming. The grey light, the cool ground underfoot, the fruit, the silence. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is nearly on us.

And that’s fine. Because it’s coming when it ought, after a season that has delivered what it should. So we had no complaints about our walk, Janka or I. On the contrary, we’d had a great time.

Into every life a little rain must fall, they say. But that’s not a problem. As long as it comes in its season.

Instead of just going on and on, as it has for the last seven years, right through the summer months. For Pete’s sake.

Raindrops keep falling
But in a kind, seasonal way