A Journal of Summer Tending

 

The prospect of escape from the city intensifies its sweetness as the days advance. By Wednesday, I find myself carrying the thought of Friday like a sealed love letter tucked close to the chest. It is borne within me like a quiet promise, a hidden joy not yet spoken aloud. 

I turn to it in wearied moments, just as the eye, unbidden, returns to the luminous distance in a painting—as William Gilpin described the eye’s instinctive drift towards gleaming water in the English landscape: a thirst for light, for clarity, for release.

 

This impulse—to turn from the clatter of the modern towards some quieter, nobler scene—was once called the pursuit of the picturesque. William Gilpin, a clergyman and an artist, with his measured sketches and travelling lectures, named it thus: that human inclination towards vistas that soothed without dullness, that stirred without overwhelming.

 

Like Herman Melville’s Ishmael—wearied not only by 'the drizzly November in [his] soul' but by the disquiet of a world grown too sharp and close—I too find that my solace is not found in the office of a therapist, beneath the gentle scrutiny of questions and stitched silences, but in the quiet compulsion to go to the sea: that old, unjudging companion who requires nothing, explains nothing, and yet, by its mere presence, restores.

 

And here, when I do arrive, the weather rarely asserts itself with certainty. It changes like a thought forming—tentative, elliptical, quietly eloquent in its indecision. There are evenings when the sun lowers itself with painterly restraint, as though brushed in by Turner’s hand—diffused, uncertain, edged in gold that fades into ash. 

The sea, ever attuned, takes on those shifting hues: first the clear sweep of ultramarine, then a velvet blue touched by shadow, and finally a sapphire so deep it seems less a colour than a memory of one.

In the garden, the thrushes descend, their brown feathers dulled by salt and rain. They come to the bird bath not simply to drink, but to bathe—ritualistically, as if to cast off the weight of the hour. There is something almost penitential in their bathing, a sacramental act: a baptism not of conversion, but of return. To be made clean again. To be reminded of one’s own aliveness. 

 

Coastal Confections and the Colours of Memory

G. appears, often without preamble, holding aloft a tub of Kelly’s Cornish ice cream. Cornish Clotted Cream flavour, my favourite. 

That particular flavour opens a chamber in my memory: the glassy sundae dishes at my grandparents’ seaside home, the high-backed chairs, the scent of salt and polished furniture, the ceremonial arrival of the knickerbocker glory. 

How reverent we were then, children before a tower of cream, jelly, fruit and syrup—eaten slowly with a long-handled spoon, as if it were a feast rather than a dessert. That taste, irreproducible and luminous, lives in memory as something sacred. 

Only Kelly’s ice cream comes near, and G. knows it. He does not ask if I want it—he simply brings it.

 

Sometimes, he adds madeleines. Homemade. Still warm, sugar-dusted, served in little ceramic shell dishes we found at a charity shop.

Yet the season in Scotland does not promise only warmth. There are days the mist rolls in with the sureness of thought left too long unattended. The sea haar drifts inland without warning, turning this side of the village into a ghost of itself. 

The familiar garden disappears behind a veil. The water becomes a suggestion. And yet—curiously—the other side of the village remains bright, clear, sunlit, as though untouched by the same hour.

 

It bewilders and beguiles. The Scottish coast, in this, reflects life itself: never uniform, rarely fair, always slightly beyond knowing. One can walk a single mile and arrive in a different season. 

 

 

Like weather, life drifts and turns—forecasted by none, endured by all. It alternates between clarity and fog, warmth and sudden chill, with no guarantee of fairness nor forewarning. From childhood to whatever end awaits, it is one continued gamble. 

The unknown, not the known, gives shape to the soul; uncertainty is the salt of existence. And those who resist it, who attempt to script life too neatly, are merely postponing their own awakening.

 

There is another kind of memory—not the heavy kind etched in stone, but one of sound turned sentiment—that plays like a glint of gold on water across the surface of our weekends. It is Let the Music Take You, the Cleo Laine and John Williams album we return to year after year. Over time, it has become more than music; it is our weather, our liturgy, our domestic benediction.

 

Laine’s voice—fluid, dusk-dark, and lark-bright by turns—moves not with artifice but sincerity. Her rendition of Colours of My Life is not a performance but a quiet manifesto: to live richly and without apology, to choose sunrise over shadow, to gather colour like fruit from the tree and let it spill, unguarded, into one’s hours. 

No quiet browns and greys, she sings, and I believe her—I feel her. I, too, would choose rose and cherry red.

 

G., whose ear bends more towards reflection than declaration, is always drawn to Cleo Laine's rendition of Imagine. There, John Williams’s guitar does not merely accompany—it listens and dances beneath her impeccable phrasing like sunlight beneath the ripples of a tidepool. 

The album bears the familial warmth of creation: John Dankworth, her husband, and their son Alec lend their instruments to the tapestry, a musical kinship that never overstates itself.

 

I do not think I shall ever forget the sensation of those summer Saturdays: music lilting across the breakfast table in the garden, the sea just visible through the hedge, and a simple bouquet of wildflowers—still fresh from G’s early walk—resting beside the teapot. 

Such mornings are not grand, but they are enduring. They are what memory clings to when the air grows thin and the light retracts. And should this sunlit world grow dark one day, it is this music, this table, this light that will show the way back. 

Not to what was, perhaps, but to the echo of what was most deeply felt. For as Proust once wrote, “The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.” —not because they are gone, but because in being lost, they are made eternal. It is their vanishing that reveals their worth, and it is memory—not possession—that allows them to endure.

In this way, paradise is not behind us, nor ahead, but folded into the soul’s quiet archive, waiting to be recalled by a scent, a voice, a song on the wind. What we have lived, we do not lose. It lives on—flickering—like sunlight through leaves, like music drifting through an open window, carrying the shape of something we once called home.

 

Bach for breakfast

 

On certain summer weekends, when the morning breaks clear and the garden is steeped in gold, G. and I take our breakfast outside, amid the soft shimmer of green and the delicate wing-beats of birds fluttering at the stone birdbath. It has become a quiet ritual—tea, coffee, warm bread, and Bach. 

Not just any Bach, but The Art of Life, Danil Trifonov’s tender tribute to the composer whose music seems to breathe with time itself. We return to it again and again, as though our very breath depends on it.

 

There is something in those measured intervals, those luminous fugues, that moves through the spirit like fingers smoothing a crease from cloth. Each phrase seems to mend what the week has unravelled.

When I hear it, I feel a long, slow exhalation—an easing of the inward tautness, a sense of being made whole. 

Gannets, those great white seabirds with black-tipped wings and pale gilt heads, have begun to appear again along the headland—drawn, it seems, by some deep instinct to follow the cooler currents northward. 

They arrive in silence, exhausted, spectral, settling upon the rocks as if in search of reprieve from the fevered seas they have fled. 

I watch them rest, fish, linger—then vanish, without signal or ceremony, like emissaries of an older world obeying laws we no longer read. 

I cannot help but see myself in their migration: weary from the crowded heat, seeking something quieter, more essential. In their coming and going, there is a grace I envy—no arrival announced, no departure grieved.

Bachelard by the Sea

Since my arrival, I have fashioned my days by the quiet order of routine. Days pass with an unchanging semblance, yet I find myself strangely reluctant to hasten them or disturb their gentle monotony. There is, after all, a peculiar solace in sameness. Even if ennui should visit, it is a quiet mercy compared to the gnawing anxiety I once carried.

 

The city’s clamour lies far behind me, its incessant noise a distant irritation now softened to a memory. Here, the sound of an early morning boat engine, the fishermen’s voices rising from the harbour, drift through my bedroom window like a fragile thread connecting me to a gentler world. 

I have abandoned the newspapers and the ceaseless news; the world beyond feels distant and discordant to this refuge.

 

When I look out, I am transported—not just in place, but in spirit. The scent of Scottish summer fills the air: salt and seaweed, rockpools and damp earth, moss mottled with white where egrets have left their trace. I breathe in this untouched wilderness—the language of nature—soft, persistent, and unyielding.

The calls of oystercatchers come, soft and resigned, as if singing a lullaby to the heat of the afternoon, and when their voices cease, a silence settles—as if one were the last soul upon the island, and the world had, at last, remembered how to rest.

 

July is the month when time seems to loosen its hold; when days drift, unmoored, into evenings. The hours stretch long across the hills and harbours, and all things—even memory—grow porous beneath the soft abundance of summer.

 

Once upon a time, there were seaside holidays with the grandparents - endless and sun-drenched, stitched together by sailing trips, potluck parties by the beach, wedding invitations and garden fêtes. 

Strawberries were served in crystal glass bowls, and there were picnic baskets, too—lined with a gingham the colour of childhood summers, their contents carefully arranged: lemonade in glass jars, sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, flasks of tea, and plates of fruit heavy with juice. 

When emptied, those same jars would be filled with wildflowers, or with bleached driftwood and salt-white bones gathered from the shore—a quiet ritual of taking the sea home, of holding the season a little longer.

Such images, though years removed, do not fade. They lodge quietly within, and when winter comes with its narrowed light and bare, listening fields, these fragments return—not merely as reminiscence, but as sustenance. The summer, once known, never fully leaves us.

 

G. and his quiet presence anchor me still further. Each afternoon, as punctual as the sun’s slow descent, he arranges our tea in the garden—a ritual carried out with devotion and care. 

The chintz cloth laid smooth, cucumber sandwiches, scones warm and tender, lemon cake melting sweetly on the tongue—all set beneath the pale Scottish sun. In those moments, our shared silence holds more meaning than any spoken word. There is an intimacy here that outlasts time itself, a gentle communion formed in the quietude between us.

 

I have often thought of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher-poet who saw in our homes something more than mere shelter—what he called the oneiric* house: a dream-house fashioned by memory, childhood, and fantasy. 

Not merely walls and roofs, but a repository of the soul’s deepest reveries. Each corner, each shadowed corridor, each forgotten drawer holds its own secret meaning, like the cryptic language of dreams. 

Bachelard writes: “One cannot bathe twice in the same river because already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of flowing water… A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away.”

In this, Bachelard echoes Heraclitus, the ancient voice who first observed that one cannot step into the same river twice. Yet Bachelard presses the metaphor deeper—not simply as a statement on change, but on the psyche’s constant dissolution and renewal. 

The self, like water, cannot remain fixed; it slips forward even as we reach to grasp it. And so it is with me. I am not the man I was when I first arrived, nor even the one I was yesterday. But there is no grief in that—only recognition. What falls away may not return, but in its place something gentler arrives.

 

July, more than any other month, feels charged with the quiet task of preservation. It is the season of tending—the month in which the oneiric house, that interior dwelling shaped by memory, childhood, and reverie, is lovingly kept. If this house is a dream, then it is a dream that must be maintained with waking hands.

 

G. worked tirelessly and engaged the local stonemasons. The pointing is finished now: stones once loosened by storm and salt are pressed firmly back into place. Gutters no longer leak beneath rain’s gentle persistence; sash windows, once swollen with damp, slide open again with ease.

These are not tasks of mere upkeep. They are, each one, acts of devotion—unspoken affirmations of care. For a house, like a love, cannot survive on structure alone. It must be noticed, attended to, believed in. It must be kept.

 

For Bachelard, a house is not merely assembled from timber or stone, but formed from memory—its true architecture shaped by reverie, by the inner life that settles into its corners and lingers along its stairwells. And yet, even he may not have said all there is to say. 

For while solitude may fill the rooms with echoes of thought, it cannot wholly sustain a dream. A true home requires more than reflection; it calls for presence—the quiet constancy of one who remains, not despite the weathering, but through it.

 

Love, like mortar, must be renewed. It cannot simply be built once and trusted to endure. It asks for the gentle labour of care: a sash window eased back into motion, a teacup placed wordlessly before another, the soft exchange of glances in a silence too familiar to require speech. 

These small, steady offerings are not embellishments; they are the very substance of devotion. In them, house and heart are made whole again—and in their keeping, both return their warmth tenfold, not merely sheltering but sanctifying.

 

I have often thought that the artist writes not only of what is held, but of what has slipped through the hands, of what was longed for or half-remembered—and sometimes, what was quietly found in the hush after longing. 

Perhaps this house is all three: a thing found, and always dreamed of; a place not only of rooms and rooftree, but of a self made whole and briefly held, before time resumes its quiet undoing.

*The word "oneiric", derived from the Greek oneiros (ὄνειρος), meaning "dream", refers to that which pertains to or is characteristic of dreams or the dreamlike. In Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy, “oneiric” takes on a particularly rich and poetic dimension—it becomes a key concept in his exploration of the imagination, reverie, and the poetic experience of space.