Tonight is one of those rare nights that I already know I will remember.  It’s 8pm on the 29th September and pitch dark, but I am sitting outside, warm and comfortable in my work shorts and one of Dave’s thin wool jumpers. We recorded 26.7C in the shade today on the nursery. It’s still warm now.  My laptop is balanced somewhat precariously on my knee and the arm of a chair. I’m typing by the friendly yellow glow of a hurricane lamp – (they are as cheap as chips and much better than any posh candle thing). One of the few useful things I learned at F.E. college was to touch type – I just need the light occasionally to relocate my hands on the keys.  Dave is out here too, but I’m not being unsociable – he’s setting up his telescope. Confident of clear skies all night, he’s experimenting with some new lenses and a webcam. Jupiter will rise soon in the east, glimmering at first through the sprawling crab apple tree before soaring over the house, brighter than any star. 

I looked at Jupiter through binoculars last night and could see that it was a disc. I could just see three moons too, though hazy and moving in and out of my focus, mainly because I knew to look for them.  But that was with 20th century lens technology. Galilleo saw four moons 400 years ago when he didn’t know they were there, with the very limited glass quality of the era. It seems quite astonishing. Through Dave’s scope I could see the four moons clearly, with two bands dark bands across the planet and just make out a bulge in the bottom band – the red spot.

It is absolutely still. I can hear passing cars on the road a mile away, a train on the distant West Coast mainline and the faint hum of the tracking drive on the telescope. The only other sound is the regular thwack of large yellow crab apples dropping onto the conservatory roof and bouncing onto the path below. I don’t really mind that these are largely man made sounds. We are product and part of nature after all, if a rather noisy part.  Last night we heard owls, but I think it’s too early yet. Something is biting at my legs. How good to be in England and not worry what the bite might carry, other than an itch.

This appears to be turning into one of those irritating day-in-a-life blog entries of no interest to anyone other than the writer, but it’s my blog so I may as well roll with it, now that I’ve started. I don’t do it very often.

The nursery closes for the winter in four days time, which seems quite amusing just now, given the weather. We close for many reasons, mostly because there is no point standing around in an October gale waiting for one customer to come in, shuffle around in the rain, have a chat to be sociable, buy a cup of tea for 80p and go home. But it’s partly pragmatic. The nursery’s water supply freezes and has to be turned off, so there are no toilets, except in the house. It makes commercial sense to close, but it also gives everyone and everything a break. Just as I will look forward to customers in March, right now I am more than ready to shut the doors. It’s hard to explain why. It’s just time to go quiet, to think and dig and plant and watch and think a bit more. After the summer months of continuous conversation, I barely speak all day in winter, except to Peter. Though that’s not really talking – more the occasional exchange of syllables, grunts and nods. That’s me, of course. Peter, largely silent in summer, does the talking in winter – of ravens, waxwings, fieldfares, moles, the cold, his dodgy knee and tales of his many alleged misdemeanours from his youth. I just listen and enjoy it.

We came indoors to watch Outnumbered, which is still very funny, but growing up. The news was the usual western-centric mix, prefixed with a description of Angela Merkel as ‘The most powerful woman in Europe’. She is of course the most powerful person in Europe, of either gender. Much ado about the possibility of raising the motorway speed limit to 80mph. Nothing about millions displaced by flooding in India. Eno Eruator presented the weather in the most stunningly bright shiny pink top and fitted skirt with a deep orange leather belt and tangerine 5″ heels. Honestly, I generally pay no attention to people’s attire. But Eno, you shine so brightly. Good on you.

It’s conference season and Ed Milliband’s speech is being dissected to the nanosecond. I’m depressed by politics. The Liberals still have me logically (I’m essentially an economic Keynsian – I think the job of government is to check and balance a vibrant free market – and very much a social liberal). But the necessary pragmatism which drove Nick Clegg into coalition and the blue tint that has washed over them since has driven away the left wing half of the party and it is facing another 20 years in the wilderness. The Tories look increasingly desperate to appease the financial sector, which shafted the economy in the first place, by holding the line on spending cuts while the economy stagnates. (I think we should be taking advantage of astonishingly low interest rates to borrow and invest in the nation’s capital infrastructure to boost growth now and productivity in the future). Meanwhile Labour are wallowing in a morass of retrospective self-flagelation.

It’s a bit of a mess. Though not as much of a mess as Greece is in. Tonight the Germans voted through a massive bailout fund. Whether or not it works, for now the Germans are the ultimate Europeans. For now. How long ageing Germans will work and pay taxes to fund early retirement for Greek civil sevants before they complain in their droves is anyone’s guess.

So, a very ordinary night at home, with Dave, a bit of TV, a glass or three of red wine, some chocolate, an occasional glance at Twitter, me mulling on things I know next to nothing about.  And all this ordinariness made extraordinarily memorable by a chance high pressure system over Scandanavia pulling a heatwave up from Greece. Like I said before, how good it is to be in England, and not in Greece.

September 29, 2011