Summer Time

Nothing written for four months, and now two posts in one day. It's just, you see, the title of my last post reminded me of Madness' performance at the Queen's Jubilee concert, and then that reminded me of the Jubilee celebration we attended in our new village, which reminded me that maybe I should write something about this exciting summer. After all, everyone else is.

The days are long here in the summer. Today is 16 hours, 32 minutes and 51 seconds long. The day of the summer solstice will be 16 hours 38 minutes and 19 seconds long. I can't sleep with all this light. When I wake up and see that it's light outside, I'm convinced that either my alarm is about to go off or it hasn't and I am going to oversleep. Since the latter is less likely, I lie awake waiting for my alarm to go off. And it doesn't. See, that's because the sunrise is at 4:44 a.m. I have one hour and six minutes before I have to get up. I wish someone would tell my sleepy brain.

But I promised you excitement.

We spent the four-day Jubilee weekend celebrating after a fashion:

• In London on that Saturday to soak up some atmosphere without the wall-to-wall people. 
• In our present village on Sunday to go to a rain-soaked hog roast that I'm not sure was so much spoiled by the weather as by the fact that it was a hog roast. So we bought beer and picked up fish and chips and watched the Thames pageant in our nice dry living room. 
• In our new village on Monday to see a coronation memorabilia display in the village hall, watch a tug of war, and say 'aawwwwww' during the 'dog show'.

Okay, not that exciting. Maybe for the Olympics.