the high days of summer

This might be a short post.  Time's getting on, and our internet is running very slow and occasionally cutting out entirely.  I haven't done much today to write about anyway.  High summer is a funny season.  Today wasn't even especially hot, but I find I slow right down at this time of year.  I don't know if it's the pollen count, or the humidity, but I can feel my faculties slow to a crawl, then they revive with the fresher weather in September.

So this morning I overslept, then played with the kittens, and did the watering, and went to the dump and bought strawberries at the farm shop on the way back, and that was it.  That was the morning gone.  I had radio 3 on in the car and so missed the news that Andrea Leadsom had withdrawn from the Tory leadership race, leading to a rather peculiar conversation for five minutes over lunch until the Systems Administrator grasped that I hadn't heard.  Her role in the Brexit campaign managed to entirely pass me by, but the awful spectacle of the Iraq war and Blair's dodgy dossier should be enough to put anybody off political leaders who sex up their CVs or anything else. And she voted against gay marriage, and speaking as a childless person I was offended by the implication that childless people were less keen on a decent future for everybody than those who had reproduced.  I would have joined the party just to vote for Theresa May, until I discovered that you had to have been a member for a minimum period, and there were no instant three pound votes to be had.

After lunch I crawled around in the gravel, pulling up weeds and planting evening primroses while trying not to squash too many things by kneeling on them.  I grew the evening primroses from a packet of seed that came free with a garden magazine, and they are flowering a fetching shade of deep orangish pink.  I think they are Oenothera 'Sunset Boulevard'.  I noticed in passing that quite a few things in the gravel had been nibbled down, and hoped that was mainly the work of the small rabbit we saw a few days ago hopping between the shelter of the herb bed and a large juniper, until it made its final appearance on the doorstep clasped in the jaws of Our Ginger, who ate it.

We propped the front door open for the kittens after breakfast, but they are starting to behave more like typical cats in that they spent a large part of the afternoon asleep in the kitchen then wanted to come outside as the evening began to draw in.  They are getting gradually more adventurous.  Mr Fluffy and the energetic kitten disappeared round the corner of the house as far as the terrace, and the cautious kitten made it from the shelter of the flower pots and the porch to the middle of the turning circle, where he boxed energetically with a patch of chives and an Agapanthus flower head.