First of the Summer Whine

For us Northern Hemispherics, today is the longest day of the year and the official First Day of Summer. More poetically, it is Midsummer’s Day – the Sabbat of Litha. In the Pagan Calendar, the Summer Solstice is “a time for celebration of the abundance of summer, and a time to prepare for the darkening”. Great! Why can’t we just celebrate the abundance of summer, and TOTALLY NOT THINK ABOUT THE DARKENING until a bit later? October perhaps, when the clocks go back and the darkening is unavoidable. I mean, here I am sitting inside on this cloudy, windy midsummer day, in my sweat-shirt and fleece with the heater on, waiting for Summer to bloody well start, and already, tomorrow, the nights will be drawing in.

That’s the trouble with this whole Cycle of the Seasons business. Either you’re in the shitty part of the year longing for the good bit to start, or you’re having the good bit ruined by the contemplation of the inevitable return of the shitty bit. Oh, and by the rain.

Unreasonable, unseasonable amounts of the stuff. More rain than we had all winter. So much rain that the ground is waterlogged and the soakaways soak not away and the streams are gurgling and bursting at the seams. Good news for big orange slugs and things that eat big orange slugs (which, actually, doesn’t seem to be anything). Bad news for all the rest of us. Except maybe Stubbs.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, Stubbs loves water. His inner puppy is actually a fish. Given the opportunity, he would spend every spare minute of every day (ie all the time that exists between sleeping and eating) snorkelling in muddy puddles and bounding sloshily up and down the full length of all our gushy tributaries to the Aumance River that is running very fat and deep and brown on the other side of the road, at the bottom of our lane. Even when he is sleeping, he is dreaming about the water. You can almost hear the splashing sounds between the snores.

Rufus is another kettle of fish entirely. Totally not a kettle of fish at all in fact. He does not like to get too wet, and he is not awfully keen on even walking through long grass that might be a bit damp. He will if he has to – to find his precious stick that Simon has naughtily lobbed into the middle of the longest, wettest grass, on purpose. But seriously, he would really rather not. And this is a weakness that Stubbs exploits relentlessly in his chasing games with Rufus. He knows that he can escape from the faster-running Rufus (whose inner puppy is a greyhound) simply by heading into the stream. And he knows that he can catch the faster-running Rufus whenever they approach a long-grassy barrier, into which the wimpy Rufus fears to tread. All in all, despite the rain, there is much entertainment to be had from the walking of the young canines about the saturated landscape these days – even at their preferred rising time of 5.45am.

Our llamas seem to have an ambivalent relationship with rain. When a heavy storm comes by, they will head, en masse, for the shelter of the trees. But if the rain is just that sort of constant wet presence that falls undramatically from a constant grey sky, they will simply lie down wherever they happen to be, and get stoically wet.

Even those of our merry band who have free access to the wonderful comforts of a dry barn almost invariably choose to sit outside in the rain. Maybe our llamas are just a bit stupid. But I think the fact that they all chose to go inside when the weather was really cold and snowy suggests that they do have the capacity to make sensible decisions in relation to their own well-being. So I’m guessing that they don’t give a damn about being all damp and bedraggled so long as they are warm enough, underneath their sodden, pungent coats of sog. Maybe if they had access to mirrors things might change. Hmmm… I feel an interesting experiment coming on…

Our cats and chickens liketh not the rain, and will cosy up inside on the dampest of damp days. Wet days are always Five Cat Days – days in which we can expect to have all five of our house-friendly moggies taking up chair space in the living room for hours at a time. On sunny days they will vanish for most, if not all of the day. Except for Min, who is a House Cat par excellence. There simply aren’t enough cushions in the outside world to cater for her luxury-loving needs.

Pigs don’t like rain either. And they especially don’t like the fact that the lawn-mower stays inside on rainy days, because it means they don’t get their scrumptious lunch of green lush. So they hunker down inside their snug and musty sty, to doze and rumble in a congenial smog of warm pig-breath, emerging whenever I pass by, to gruntle their disgruntlement at the miserable wet weather, and snortle their disgust at the muddy dullness of the day’s dinner menu.

We’ve all had enough of the rain now. Time for Summer to begin. And apparently it will do very soon, so that by the end of this week I will be able to get back to (seasonally-appropriate) complaining about the heat, and the lack of shade for sitting in, and the flies, and the insect bites, and the fact that I have to keep refilling the animals’ water buckets, and creating muddy wallows for the poor pigs who really don’t like to be hot and dry. And the pigs will run up to the fence every time I walk by to gruntle their disgruntlement at the miserably hot weather, and snortle their disgust at the dusty dryness of the day’s dinner menu.

And, as always, I will be able to reply “I know just how you feel”. Sometimes I wonder if my inner child is a pig.