July Thoughts

Here in my little bit of Norfolk, we’ve so far had quite a nice summer. By nice, I mean warm and sunny. There have been years, like last year, when I was still wearing tights and a coat in early July! But this year, I’m already used to the warmth. I sometimes wonder whether to bring a cardigan with me when I go out, but more often I’m focused on not forgetting my hat, sun cream and extra water.

It feels that this is how it should be. By this time of year, the days are long and golden. Thoughts turn to holidays, seaside trips or lakeside picnics, and meadows full of wild flowers.

Still, I do worry about the heat. I remember back in 2006, when my eldest son was a baby, how the roads were melting. It was 30°C, which is very hot for here. Back then, days that hot were rare. I remember the road sticking to the wheels of the pram, and ending up with tar on the kitchen floor.

I don’t remember it ever being this hot when I was a child. These days, when a hot spell comes, it often feels extreme, not normal-for-England hot. Whether it is part of natural cycles (in Roman times it was warm enough here to grow grapes, and in the Victorian era there was a mini ice age that froze the Thames in winter), or whether it is the result of what we humans are doing, it is hard not to feel uneasy. Even if this heat is natural, there are plenty of other ways we’re damaging the planet. The ecological nightmare of fast fashion is just one.

I’m not sure how I feel about July. I know some people love it. I think I prefer early summer, when everything is green and warm weather is still a novelty. It’s nice being able to go out without a coat, and the long, light evenings are lovely, but it’s not so much fun being too hot, or waking up at 4 every morning because the sun has slipped round the edges of the blackout blinds and told your brain it’s time to start the day.

Even though we had some rain earlier in the week, everything is parched. Grass everywhere is yellow and brittle. But still, this is part of our year, part of the seasons and there is beauty and joy to be found in all of it. I can see it. There’s a field of wheat almost ready for harvest near one of my favourite footpaths. Shady spots are bliss. And the buddleia in my garden has grown wild and huge, and is covered in butterflies.

So I put hot water bottles in the freezer, tape netting over the windows to stop the cats from escaping, stock up on ice pops, and make sure I put a hat on before going outside. And then I can enjoy it, blue skies, dry grass, butterflies, the whole hot, hazy tangle of it.

With several weeks of school still to go, the first week in July always starts to feel like too much. When my boys were at primary school, it was worse. They were tired and cranky, and there was always too much going on. Too many events squeezed in before the end of term, when everybody (including the teachers) had simply had enough. We assume that children like sports days and trips to the zoo, and the loosened structure of the end of the summer term, but not all of them do. And for parents, usually mums, trying to hold it all together and remember everything, while feeling just as tired, it can be overwhelming.

Now my boys are older, it’s easier, but there’s still a sense of everything piling up. School trips, exams, reports, Scout camp, end of term fun, thank yous to say (and, if I’m honest, some that will be ignored in favour of a sigh of relief).

We all want it to be the end of term. When my boys were small, I used to make a little party tea for them on the last day, complete with bunting and cake. I did it again a couple of years ago, when they were 17, 15, 13 and 10, and the older ones were not impressed! I miss them being little, although there are things I don’t miss, and there things to enjoy now that I couldn’t then.

It all changes, the seasons, our lives, the things we can do or can’t do. Being older seems to be about collecting more and more memories as time goes on, like a big basket of overflowing laundry. Never mind death and taxes, change, ironically, seems to be the only constant.

So off I will go, down my favourite lanes and footpaths, with my hat on, and without my children who are big enough to be left at home (though the youngest one might join me if he can play Pokemon Go and isn’t not engrossed in something else that I am tempted to file under nonsense). The same paths, the same crops but not the same. Me the same, but not the same. Past the fields of wheat and potatoes and sugar beet, along the road people used to call the old main road when we first moved here 23 years ago, but nobody does now, up to the tiny little wood on the edge of the village, then home again.

And so July unfolds, a little too bright, a little too much, but full of beauty too. I walk the same paths in a world that’s always changing, watching the wheat ripen, the butterflies dance, the light stretch long into the evening. Some days I feel the weight of it all: the heat, the memories, the never-ending to-do lists, but then I catch a breeze in the shade, or see a butterfly land in the buddleia, and remember: this, too, is part of the story. A hot, hazy chapter in the ever-turning book of the year.