“Fish, fly-replete, in depths of June, dawdling away their wat’ry noon.” Alas, Rupert Brooke died before making his mark as a poet. I was in his house (his father was housemaster) at school and had a crush on his memory. I also spend too long watching my two thriving goldfish in their garden tank. Their names are Cae (the gold one) and Gwian, who is red and white. They don’t, of course, speak Welsh, but they answer to their names promptly when they see their breakfast settling on the water. They survive near-freezing in winter and seem to have no objection to the water on the warm side of tepid today.
The forty-odd pots dotted around the garden are refreshed twice a day, with the thermometer showing 30 degrees C (better expressed as 86” F). Two thirds of the garden, thank goodness, lies in the shade of the house, the neighbour’s walnut and the park-size sycamore. 30 degrees feels warm enough. At our farmhouse in the Allier in the 1990s it once reached 40. We took off our clothes and lay on the tiled floor. The tall oaks in the forest around us loved it.
