The swifts are back.
I thought I heard one yesterday, but wasn’t sure, it is still very early in the year, and I wasn’t quite expecting them so soon. Today there can be no doubt, they are here in their dozens, whirling and swooping and calling. Long days and swifts, it is beginning to be summertime.
It is still dry.
Regular readers will know that this is a very unusual state of affairs for the Lake District.
We do rain here, in copious quantities, it is our all-year-round weather condition.
Today it was cloudy, but there was no rain, nor even the promise of any. Now it is evening and the sun has reappeared and we are basking in a warm pink teatime glow.
Obviously I like this very much. I can hardly imagine that there might be a climate in which one might celebrate the arrival of rain. We are accustomed to rain in such abundance that people here never plan a picnic or a barbeque without benefit of a tent, or at the very least an umbrella.
This sudden departure from our normal meteorological habit is disconcerting. We have been taken by surprise.
Everything is becoming unexpectedly short of water.
We have had to spend a good deal of today trying to address this difficulty. This was because we spent all of yesterday doing things in the house, so today it was the turn of outside again.
We have been playing at being the flower farmer in Manon des Sources, not the bit where he sews her ribbon to his chest obviously, which has always struck me as being perfectly revolting.
There is no water on the allotment. All of the rain barrels are empty.
When we got up this morning I washed up and pegged the washing out whilst Mark filled the wheelbarrow with water and dozens of collapsed cardboard boxes that he has been saving. He squished them about until they were sodden, and then we hauled the whole lot up to the allotment.
When we got there we soaked all of the rows of little seeds again: then we mulched along them again with the cardboard.
Obviously we have had to leave enough light along the actual rows of seeds for them to germinate, but we have covered the ground alongside them as closely as we can with grass clippings, and then covered those with sodden cardboard.
This stops the water from evaporating off the surface, it will mean the little seeds stay damp and warm and with any luck they will be able to geminate without withering to desiccated crisps. Once they have got a decent root going they will be fine, and probably normal weather will return sooner or later anyway, but just now it is important.
There is no rain forecast for as far as the BBC oracle seems to be able to look, so I think I will take all the rest of the curtains down to wash this week. It is ace weather for washing.
I was hoping to be able to hang the last lot back up today, and to finish the cleaning, but we ran out of time before we had got to go to work. Also our exciting new hoover has not arrived yet. When I looked on the website it said that somebody had tried to deliver it at ten o’ clock but we were out. Since we had been sitting in bed right next to the front door having coffee at that time this was obviously not true, and we thought that probably the delivery man had fancied having a rascally lie in instead. Maybe it will come tomorrow.
An unexpected consequence of all our cleaning activity has been that several times today Mark has had to rescue me from newly-homeless spiders, flogging The Big Issue and lurking forlornly in unexpected corners. He is very brave about spiders and I am a weed.
I took the picture below at work this evening. I do like this time of year.
