This summer was hot. A very, very hot one indeed.

Waves of heat. End of May, half of June, the whole of July. And August.

The sun is still smiling in September.

I’m not complaining, (though I am a bit), but my lawn certainly is. It looks like straw, it smells like straw, it needs a good drink. There was an unusual smell first thing in the morning. Like damp hay. Cloying.

We’ve had some more rain recently, intermittent showers, and isolated patches of green are beginning to reappear. It reminds me of wispy bum fluff. Some of the stubble is so down trodden and gone, I’ll be amazed if it actually comes back, that I’m left with islands of green and seas of mud.

Its not very often that I tire of the sun like I tire of the winter. But this year I did. There was a point I became so acclimatised to temperatures of thirty-five degrees plus, I shoved a jumper on when it dropped to twenty-eight. Isn’t twenty-eight considered to be uncomfortably hot?

Well it certainly is for me.

I don’t remember the famous summer of ’76. There are pictures of my sun-kissed five-year-old self in a bright orange swimming costume on the golden Cornish stretches of Praa Sands Beach. (We used to holiday there every year until I was thirteen in a family run hotel meters away from the tumbling dunes.)

My daughter got lucky, her GCSEs coinciding with the cooler weeks in May and June, but the walloping heat of spring bank week meant she couldn’t focus on her studies, all the information she needed to take in.

A lot of ice creams were eaten. A lot of cool baths were had.

Wave upon wave of flushes, forehead dripping, sweat gathering in the crook of my elbows, behind my knees. Hard to distinguish between them and the sweltering pricks of the sun.

At least I had The Lake, and its now very balmy waters. Four times a week. Head up—old skool breast stroke. And then August, the algae came, so it was closed for a few weeks. But thankfully it turned out the algae wasn’t blue-green, just green, and particularly dense and slimy in places, a little stinky too, coating the insides of my costume. Nothing a good shower couldn’t fix. No way a bit of sludge was going to put me off. Nature. Community. The geese flying low. The beedy-eyed heron on its branch. Essential for every pocket of my health. Which is just as well as the ice bucket has been out of action since the hosepipe ban.

Another hot one the evening of the deep, partial eclipse. Golden is how I would describe it. The sun. The grass. The excitement of everyone who’d gathered on the hill, special glasses on. Then the light changed, slivery, purplish hues, and the shadows across the fields, behind bodies, thin and long. The moon almost swallowed the sun, then spat it out again. A cosmic belch. I thought it was rather wonderful. In fact, it’s been a lifelong dream to see a full totality and so, in an impetuous moment, I booked a holiday next year on the Costa Del Sol, the eclipse of the century sweeping over early August. It blew a hole in my wallet, but at last I’ll finally get to see, and my daughter too, perhaps her only opportunity in her lifetime. I would have loved to have been in Luxor but a near three minutes totality in Spain is still going to totally blow me away.

After the GCSE results were through, and time for our holiday, it typically became a tad more inclement. (But not enough for the garden, though.) The afternoon and evening of our glamping trip—a dwelling amongst the trees with a hot tub fired by logs—the storm clouds rolled in. It didn’t rain hard though, just fat spit spots and rumbling thunder, like chairs being dragged across the sky. And then we lucked-out with our very fancy spa half-day that included afternoon tea. The sun shone brilliantly as we read our books, sipped our tea and pondered on another dip in the calming temperatures of the bubbling hydro pool.

And now it’s mid September, the equinox tomorrow, the sun on the cusp of Libra, and apart from a few showers, it’s still shining on and on…. We are in for another few weeks of temperatures dancing in the seventies. Pleasant. Balanced. Indian. But I have no doubt whatsoever the rain will finally come, this in England after all, and that the restrictions will lift and I’ll be able to fill the ice bucket once more.