I just pulled one of my grandmother’s poetry books from the shelf. There aren’t that many of them, but they are all inscribed “Midsummer Day” and were gifts from her husband on her birthday. This particular book – Poems by Thomas Hood – is dated exactly 100 years ago.
My favourite Hood poem is The Bridge of Sighs, but that’s too long to post here, so I’ll settle for one that’s appropriate to the time as well as the date:
Continue reading “midsummer night”
As I’ve said before, not only do Google adapt their logo according to the date, but they do so according to location, too. I find it strange, though, that June 21st should warrant a special logo only on the google.es page – celebrating el inicio del verano – and not on the .com or .co.uk versions. After all, surely summer starts on the same day?
Continue reading “summery”
The sun slopes down into a summer evening
and hulking mountains strive to shed
the last rags of snow.
Sadly, the light has been all wrong the last few evenings to take a better picture, but the snow is still clearly visible in this one that I took one morning last week. There’ve been a lot fewer clouds for the last couple of days- it was positively hot outside at 9am today – and, although there are still a few shreds of white up on the peaks, I don’t think they’ll last many more days.
Between gold and silver, they can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to be suns or moons.
Apparently, its early blossoming makes the plum a symbol of vitality in Japanese culture: our tree here in Spain certainly seems to be full of life.
(Fortunately, although they aren’t perfect, the fruits aren’t too full of insect life this year.)
I’m not that surprised by names like Burt Bacharach and Jerry Lee Lewis: I sort of expect those guys to go on for ever. But George Benson, Kool and the Gang, Jeff Beck, James Taylor…
In August, I’ll be attending the Writers’ Summer School in Swanwick. There’s a ‘Retro Revival’ disco planned for the Tuesday night, and I’m pretty sure the music will overlap with what’s on in Madrid this summer.
Incidentally, for the Spanish readers among you, this ‘noticia’ about the Veranos logo might be amusing. (If your Spanish isn’t quite up to scratch, remember: don’t believe everything you read on the web.)
don't confuse the narrator 