midsummer

It was 19:00 and raining gently. We went out looking for patio slabs. Rain is the best weather for robbery. We remembered a place to try, a dumping ground in a spinney. I had got stuck in here once in the van so this time I parked a bit further away with two wheels still on the main road. Some young bullocks feeding, hides all streaked with rain, shied away from us at first but then they got used to us. The paving slabs were thick and too big and heavy to easily work with, so we dropped them on each other and smashed them up. We loaded up the boot of the car until it sagged.

Then we went and climbed Cley Hill. Our trainers got soaked and then all of our jeans up to knee height, but far in the west you could at last see the long straight edge of the raincloud and as it got nearer the sky lightened and then the long grasses began to twinkle and finally at 2040 a little sun raced on the empty hilltop. There were some rosy groups of orchids but I'd forgotten to charge the camera, and lots of bedraggled but glowing rockrose and trefoil and horseshoe. Flying up the hill had been just invigorating and lung-filling, but getting off it wasn't so straightforward. Cley is steep on all sides (and of course Laura went and chose the steepest descent of the whole lot). Bare chalk is very slippy and the wet turf was just about as bad. Anyhow we bumped down somehow and went to Little Chef for tea and chips and a KitKat, then we dropped by mine to get a bottle of milk, then we went to a garage and got some more chocolate, then we went to Laura's and unloaded the paving slabs, now with fine-combed cirrostratus overhead. Then I went home and wrote a couple of things and then I went to bed and read Bill Bryson about Einstein and Max Planck until it was quite late. That was a midsummer evening, I thought.