Random Thoughts In The Afternoon

I awakened early this morning to be greeted by sunshine, birdsong and a dog wanting to walk. She’s a Lurcher x German Shepherd bitch of indeterminate years. We’ve had her for 13 years and she was a rescue dog then. So, while the day was still relatively cool and not too humid I took her for one of four 500metre walks she’s allowed each day (this on our vet’s advice) Within 50 or so feet of our door we entered a green oasis of trees, ponds and fairly dense undergrowth. She wandered and fossicked and generally enjoyed the cool. Suddenly she rumbled a short growl and dashed into a thicket. She reappeared within seconds carrying half a wood pigeon. Looking around the find site it was pretty obvious that one of our semi-rural / semi-urban foxes had been at work.

The area was quiet,  many birds use the trees as an overnight roost and fly  out to the fields on  forraging expeditions each day.  One stately shape did  emerge from the shadow, a Tawny Owl peered myopically in our direction, screwed it’s neck around ‘backwards’ and thereafter ignored us. It was safe on its perch and seemed to ‘say’ as much by its body language.

We returned home to a breakfast prepared by my wife (for the PC brigade she is also my partner – and a damned fine partner she’s been for the past 37 years). Over a second cup tea for me and coffee for Sheila we discussed the day’s necessary chores. She has a fair amount of horsey stuff to organise and orchestrate; while I have little of pressing urgency. I decide to walk. Some three hours of fairly medium speed and I decide to return home via the local market town. The temperature and humidity have soared and I am feeling enervated by the climate. It’s not that I don’t enjoy sunshine but heat and humidity don’t somehow quite jell for me.

So, I now sit with a cooling glass of light wine watching trees blow about quite violently as intermittent winds seem to catch their tops. They look like fields of unripe corn being tossed by waves of fenland willi-waws.

As I ponder the view two large twin-rotor military helicopters fast-rope about 16 men each and some equipment into the nearby military training facility. Briefly they hover and then whisk away over the horizon. The insistent sound of their rotors should have disturbed me, but for some reason it just made me glad that now I didn’t have to do such things.

Tomorrow is the last day of July, then it will be August and the time for harvesting and ripeness in the earth. The mornings will become marginally darker and heavy ground mist could bury trees up to half their height. They look like a sunken forest when that happens. It will be a time of heavier dew and longer nights. Mysterious skies will show a floating moon and stars in abundance. It will be a time for me to get out even more. I like the end of summer and the approach of autumn. Some sort of primitive longing stirs in me during this time. Perhaps I’m a frustrated hunter/gatherer who prefers hunting to gathering.

Now I have refilled my glass and the wine bottle looks quite sheepish and out of its natural element of being full of the grape.   Perhaps I should open its twin!   It seems a good day for wine drinking in the afternoon sunshine.  It’s almost an Ernest Hemmingway moment in one sense and a Colin Fletcher ‘Secret World’ in another.