With the temperature in what we used to call the 80s (even for a day or two the 90s) a north-facing garden has been a boon. The French window from the kitchen is open; the garden flows into the house and vice versa, a big white parasol shades the central table, our neighbour’s walnut offers grateful shade and the constant splash into the little faux-lead tank with its residents Cae and Gwian, goldfish named after our woods in Wales, reminds me of the soothing lines in The Ancient Mariner: ‘The noise of a hidden brook, in the leafy month of June, which to the sleeping woods all night singeth a quiet tune.’ This is the sound that tells the mariner his ordeal on his stricken ship is coming to an end. It percolates soothingly through the open bathroom window while we sleep.
But where have the birds gone? Have our resident robin and the pair of blackbirds joined the rest of our neighbours in the Cotswolds, or Cornwall, leaving the shuttered street silent, the road unencumbered with parked cars? August in London is a city muted – save for the screeching parakeets; a town three quarters asleep. In the rest of the year a long day spent reading carries a shadow of guilt. Not in August.
