Yesterday the clouds spread like ink across the summer sky and then dried and disappeared, and I took a long, lazy run around Christ Church Meadow half-hoping to catch a glimpse of Alice’s Day, and when I came home I crawled back into bed and we had a nap with the window wide open to let in an almost-autumnal wind.

In the evening we watched the sun setting over the Oxfordshire countryside amidst the tea lights and elderflower champagne of a midsummer wedding.

It occurred to me sometime between then and now that even when I am not working, I am.  I’m always working.  Isn’t that frightening?  And a little exciting?

I’ve been reading and re-reading Louis MacNeice’s Selected Poems.  Here’s one for you on this sunny, windy, green July Sunday:

Coda

Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.

So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.

From Louis MacNeice. Selected Poems. London; Faber, 1988, p.158.