The Longest Day

Yesterday was the longest day, not the same thing, apparently, as Midsummer Day which is on Tuesday. I can vouch for the former. Every minute, every hour, dawdled by like a reluctant schoolchild so that by 5pm when I was hungry and ready to cook my supper I couldn't believe how early it still was. Enforced idleness and me are not natural bedfellows. I allowed myself a little gentle stone collecting, but otherwise mooched between the house and the summerhouse in the warmest sunshine, trying unsuccessfully to do the last few clues in the crossword, and struggling with "A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing" by Eimear McBride, according to the critics the latest in a long line of brilliant Irish writers and the new James Joyce. It's an extraordinary book alright, but the grammar and syntax are so strangulated that the reader battles to translate its opacity into something comprehensible. "I knocked it back in two sittings," crowed the Listener's reviewer, "and I'm still reeling." I knocked back 20 pages in two hours, and I'm reeling too. There's an amazing story in there somewhere, and the raw descriptions of rural poverty and the brutal hand of the Church are agonisingly vivid. But an easy read it ain't, and my scrambled brain wasn't up to it. I'll go back to Ronnie's soothing "The Time by the Sea" where I can relax and luxuriate.

By 10pm I was ready for a short stroll down the lane, and immediately spotted my old friends the deer, leaning casually into the copse of trees over the field. My eyes are so attuned to my landscape now that I can immediately pick up something unusual. I fancied that they were waiting expectantly for the final setting of the sun, sensing, perhaps, that the glory days are over and from here on in they will be getting shorter. By 11 it was still bright, but my camera is not good enough to capture an evening sky and the flash blurred the image. It's imprinted on my retina though, several inches of pinky grey lit from below while above a distinctly drawn line lurked a darker layer of steady cloud. Today has started dull and still, the deer having crept away noiselessly on delicate hooves during the night. As I said, it's all downhill now.