June 20th For the Want of a Druid

Boris has ideas about extending shop opening hours or factory shift patterns in order to kick start the economy. I’m surprised he hasn’t thought about delaying the summer solstice for the same reason. I’m sure he thinks he can. The summer solstice comes too early anyway. We’re just about getting used to the idea of long evenings in the garden or late sunset walks when suddenly we’re passing the longest day and sliding remorselessly into declining light. This is psychologically complicated this year when the shortening days and impending gloom run counter to the increasing freedom and (for the moment) relief as the Coronavirus slowly lets up. It’s a bit like the trick of running your right hand clockwise around your tummy simultaneously with your left going anti-clockwise on your head. Can the spirits rise while the sun sinks?

I’ve often looked forward to the longest day only to have it a dull rainy lacklustre sort of day with low cloud in the evening, not a hint of sun and a drab daylight sliding anonymously into night. It’s so often a bitter disappointment. There’s a similar scene in E.M.Forster’s ‘Passage to India’ except it’s about a group of people getting up very early and taking a train ride to watch a supposedly spectacular sunrise. I can’t find a copy of the book to check the details, but I recall a hazy light coming up over the horizon and no one being quite sure if the sun has risen or not. I’m wondering how many times over the next months we are going to have occasions of expectation only to be left wondering if anything has actually happened. Meanwhile each day seeps into the next incognito.

It’s not like that of course for teachers and shop workers and everyone trying to live and work in weird and untried conditions, when everyday is likely to be significant in some way – experiments, successes, disappointments, frustrations. Maybe the day I’m longing for, coffee and cake in a cafe, a pint in a pub, will end up with it just being a weak cup of coffee, a dry cake and a lukewarm pint. I think we oldies are managing to control our excitement and anticipation. When they hung the sign saying ‘Vulnerable and at Risk’ round our necks, they told us to isolate for 12 weeks. So for 12 weeks I undertook to continue my blog, which means two more to go to make it the 84. But will things be any different after Monday?

I hope the summer solstice savants, the druids and the tom-tom beaters have a day of sun shine and a balmy evening. A few years back, with no idea of what day it was Deirdre and I and some friends went for a walk towards the Nine Ladies stone circle. As we entered the area we encountered a young couple. Their multiple piercings and tattoos gave them the appearance of a pair of kitchen colanders covered with tarmac, but they were very caring and very polite and warned us that if we proceeded on our way, we might find it all a bit disturbing. We were never sure what it was about our appearances that made them fear we would not fit in with beads and dreadlocks, tie-dyes and marijuana. But when we reached the spot it was lovely: families were camping and children playing, groups sat round camp-fires singing or whittling or doing other crafts. I suspect some of the participants would have a good wash and unbraid their hair come Monday in order to return to their estate agents or accountants offices. But it was all very low key and amicable and I didn’t feel averse to hugging a standing stone myself. It certainly was a case of questioning this couple’s expectations of us and ours of them.

Today Deirdre managed her excitement at going on her first food shop by doing it at Marks and Spencer’s rather than Aldi. Her reasoning was, if she is going to catch the virus then it will be a better class of virus and the quality of food better as reward. She kissed me ‘Goodbye’, a novelty because we never go out. She returned from Matlock like a Victorian country lass who having gawked at the big city returned with relief to her milking parlour. All those people, lots of cars and she admits to being one of those of a certain vintage who forgot to socially distance when grabbing for the cous cous.

I’ve often commented on markers of time passing – diaries, calendars, weekends, wheelie bins – and how these all erode into uniformity. Perhaps it’s better to go cosmic and just measure the seasons by the solstices. At the winter solstice, at 11 am when I have coffee in our sunroom, the sun is behind a particular point of the window frame. Christmas passes and we enter the New Year and I suddenly notice with a tiny surge of pleasure, that the sun has eased upward a fraction. When driving to Nottingham in the mornings to college in February as I came round the roundabout at Sainsbury’s on the A610, suddenly the sun would blind me over Codnor. This could mean I was late, but it also signified the lengthening light. 5,200 years ago, the Neolithic people of Ireland built New Grange, probably to house the bones of the dead. At precisely midday at the winter solstice the sun glimpsed through a gap above the door jamb and a shaft of light penetrated a long corridor and shone on the bones of the dead.

We have no druids in Crich but can someone invent a ritual that celebrates the summer solstice as a moment of exaltation and hopeful anticipation, rather than as a split second of climax that signals a relentless decline into blighted seasons and livelihoods and ultimate darkness? So Deirdre and I have concocted our sort of midsummer rite: a steak dinner with a good red wine and some cheese followed by climbing the 97 ancient stone steps that lead up to the high Tors behind us. However a slight detour enabled us to miss out the 97 steps. There are no stone circles but a few pebbles to kick and a stone stile to embrace so we could be a bit primitive and mysterious. A greyish purple cloud dimmed the evening and spread a thin gauze over the sun. Whichever way, visible or invisible to us, the sun sank into the west. Nothing spectacular actually happened, and the world will quietly pivot towards the second part of this year.

Over parts of Africa and Asia tonight there will be a ring of fire solar eclipse. Maybe, just maybe, as the world turns on its axis tonight we might emerge from darkness and enter a long summer of light and consideration for each other, for our own well-being and for our planet. Just something else to cause us to wonder.