August is known as the silly season. It is also the wettest month of the year normally. I say ‘normally’ because this year the drought has continued – we have had getting on for 12 weeks of hot sunshine now. The temperature rarely does below 30 degrees during the day. This means that everything is parched:
I make for Spain and then a two hour drive to a remote spot near Girona.:
The House:
My room:
Once a Convent, the interior is very Spanish style:
We manage good performances based around circulations. The set list:
The team
We also have some spectacular weather whist there: very large hail stones and apocalyptic skies:
We all watch the eclipse of the sun by the moon. The moon passes over the sun and fits perfectly to block out the light. A strange atmosphere descends on the lands – birds and dogs go quiet, cats run for safety. Apparently, this will not happen again until the 2080s!!
From the garden:
August the 13th is also the anniversary of Blake’s death. He does – singing the songs of heaven – 199 years ago.
‘remain in Hell without despair’.
It being summer, I have been enjoying some summer listening: Songs for a Nervous Planet by Tears for Fears –one of my favourite bands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty1_VLRqOPs&list=PLxA687tYuMWgudoIZ85p16_JqH81yhLll
And reading!!! Well, a new edition of John Cowper Powys’ Glastonbury Romance – a novel of some 1175 pages. A tale set in mysterious Glastonbury that weaves together a cast of more than 40 characters as they interact with the elemental forces that surrounds them. At the centre, of course, is the myth of the Grail.
Here, is a taster – how it begins….
‘At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a certain radius of Brandon Railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul and the First Cause of all life……..’