Paradise

We had breakfast with the door open onto the garden. Last night I flung wide my bedroom window for the first time. This weather is completely delightul, even if I have to cover my body from top to toe and put sunscreen on the exposed bits. The air is filled with forgotten scents and birdsong, the latter much more evident than in recent years. Behind me in the field the skylarks keep up a non-stop performance from their lofty positions. It's impossible to feel anything other than joy. I decided to leave the second half of the end terrace for now and tackle the patio by the back door. Normally I love this job, transforming the blackened, scummy surface into a shiny clean one, but it seemed to take for ever this morning. I had frequent stops so the machinery didn't overheat, but even so it was never ending. After a good long break, though, my appetite returned and I turned the power hose on everything else, including the car. If it's not moving I squirt it.

Eventually I dropped onto the recliner on the lawn where the burgeoning sorbus is beginning to cast a little bit of shade. Hugo lay panting beside me in the full sun though I had shown him a nice spot in the shadows. So I pointed to the cool place under my seat and he half crawled in. From the other side I urged him forwards, and he wriggled towards my hand until he was fully protected from the boiling rays. Gosh, it was hot. I once holidayed in Turkey when the temperature was over 40 degrees and all over Europe people were dropping dead like flies. I'll never know how I bore it.

Driving to Halesworth this morning with the sun beating against my right ear I listened to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time. It's always interesting and usually enlightening, but today's revelation shocked me to the core. For probably nigh on 50 years I've been calling the husband of the heroine of Middlemarch Cazzerbon, emphasis on the first syllable. But no, it's actually Ca-sor-bon, stress on the middle syllable. Who knew? In fact, how do they know? Are there other Casaubons who they've been able to ask?  How can I ever think of him the same way again? Or Dorothea for that matter, who married someone called Ca-saur-bon? I'm feeling very confused, but in defiance have taken the book off my shelves and started reading it again, pronouncing his name the new way in my head. Reading books I already own is in keeping with a Susan Hill that David has loaned me. She decided to buy no new books for a year, but instead visit her shelves to find never-read books or those she wanted to read again. Just 70 pages into her book I've been reminded of favourites that could do with a re-read, and so I've ended up with a nice pile, just like she did.

Never has a dog loved comfort as much as the Huguenot