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| Reading Oscar Wilde's 'An Ideal Husband' |
Summer party this afternoon and our staged reading (under my faltering direction) of 'An Ideal Husband.' The weather looks as though it will be kind - a blessing (as Poirot might put it) 'most considerable,' though interestingly the Welsh weather forecast illustrated the afternoon with an ominous patch of blue over the Vale of Glamorgan, while the UK forecast foretold a sunny afternoon everywhere. As the Welsh forecasters work from the same data - indeed the same maps - I wonder how such differences (which occur frequently) happen. Anyway 'Ideal Husband' by Oscar Wilde is our entertainment for this afternoon.
Later
Afternoon passed off very well, considering. All the actors played their socks off and the weather was kind, the garden lovely and the music transporting. (As the piano was placed between beds of lavender, Bach wafted towards us in the interval on the calming scent).
We even had a pigeon come to visit - not, a dove of which I am particularly fond, though it did have a large white flash on its neck and therefore may have some dove blood from way back. It rather crashed landed in the ash tree that hangs over the river not twenty feet from where we were playing and it may have been shot for I heard distant popping, as though the farmers were busy with their guns, and the bird’s feathers looked ruffled. But it didn't appear seriously hurt, more exhausted than frightened. Anyway it climbed higher in the tree and from its position in the gods sat watching the third act of the play. The thought occurred that the bird might have been old Oscar himself, reincarnated and come to watch how his play looked one hundred and twenty years on. Do the dead take on the forms of living creatures? Many people seem to think so.
15 August
Each year there comes a day when the weather says 'summer is over; autumn has arrived.' The seasons change in a day. One moment you are out in the garden until nine o'clock, basking in bare sleeves and the next you are thinking about lighting the fire, looking for dry logs and it is dark at seven. The wind gets up and the rain is no longer summer rain but autumnal, borne in on an Atlantic wind that makes the trees toss angrily and which finds from somewhere you hadn't noticed little piles of dried leaves to blow around. The air smells different: an autumnal fruity smell; an odour of finality. That's it, it seems to say: growth over, the year over, downhill all the way now. Of course, young September will rebel and October may bring fresh crisp frosts and magnificent colours to the foliage; fruit may be abundant and be not yet ready for picking, but there comes a day when you know that that is it for another year and that day was today - 15 August - early, so perhaps we are in for a hard and unrelenting winter. At least in these Bardic parts of the kingdom. Stock up little birds, fatten yourselves up at my bird table, nibble away you rodents that scurry in the nightime - for it is a long time until next May and there will be hungry months ahead.
This morning however it is brighter and sunnier - but in an autumnal sense now. I am still worried by the lack of insects and the absence of House Martins in the sky. Last night when I walked to the castle for a bit of exercise as I often do, the bats were out in force, searching perhaps for a hatch of something or other. Having just written that I notice a fly and a bee basking in the sunshine on the wall outside my office window. The bee seems to be trying a handstand, which on a vertical wall is rather difficult. Anyway he has now given up and flown away. The starlings that used to be so numerous and which used to nest under my eaves are also now completely absent.
16 August
If I walk for thirty five minutes along the disused railway line - full of rabbits now - and with cows and sheep grazing among the hawthorn and ash on every side and then if I turn off and walk up through an elderly wood lit by dappled sunlight on the leafy branches and so up the hill I eventually turn the corner and there is a thatched pub that serves draught Bass. And that's where I have just been to sit in the autumnal sunshine and sip a pint of the best beer to have been brewed since 1777 or whenever it was that Bass was first brewed - before the French and American revolutions certainly - and ponder on my various literary projects.
I am experimenting at the moment with self-publishing a book I have long had on the stocks - a bit of first world war history - grim for a day such as today, or any day really. It was begun in 1983 and it has been sitting on my conscience since. Then in November I have to give a talk in Cambridge about my researches into Neolithic measurement: I have been asked by an undergraduate archaeology society, so I think it’s time to assemble all the papers and website data I have accrued in the last twenty or thirty years and make them into another book, which I could hand round and even autograph. The material is all written: I’d just have to edit it and prepare a continuous text. After that there’s ‘Boraya’ - my great (at least in words) Russian novel which at the moment sits in London on an agent’s slush pile. If there’s no interest come November then I’ll publish that myself, too.
Now I must prepare some supper: avocado, lettuce, tomato, feta, smoked salmon, perhaps with a glass of white wine if I feel extravagant. Afterwards we shall have the remains of some pastries, which a kind neighbour bought over this morning, and contemplate tomorrow. The sky is blue and, wonder of wonders, there is even a House Martin in the sky. It must have put in a fleeting appearance just for me. Or maybe it’s the spirit of some dead ancestor just checking up.
