It's Midsummer's Day.

This makes more sense when you think -- as the Celts did -- of summer kicking in at the beginning of May and lasting till the end of July.

Midsummer, eventually renamed St John's Day, was "one of the most popular and keenly-observed festivals throughout the early modern period. Rural communities marked it with Morris dancing, processions, late-night drinking, the blessing of crops and the ritual banishment of devils and other unwelcome sprites -- precisely the sort of pagan-originating, Catholic-saint-encompassing mishmash that Protestant reformers despised."

You also wonder whether it's the Midsummer spirit of gay abandon that motivated this week's massive relaxation of anti-coronavirus restrictions...

Here in Norfolk in recent days, summer has certainly been back, and the world has been looking all blue and gold:




The red-gold bundle below, by the way, is dodder, a parasite that attaches itself to whatever it can -- in this case the gorse bushes on Incleborough Hill -- and sucks out their juices (weakening them, but not actually killing them):


This morning we set off just after 5 am, taking our breakfast with us.


The paths are now incredibly overgrown in places. The recent rain and the current high temperatures have worked like rocket fuel.

We ate our beef sandwiches behind Sea Marge, the story of which provided me with so much interest in the early days of last month.


We walked home through more gold:





And for tea we had little suns, in the shape of zucchini with parmesan:


In accordance with our latest plan, we've now booked accommodation in Norwich, and seats on a flight to Malaysia, and have started the process of arranging somewhere to stay during our quarantine.

My Midsummer hope is that we'll steer clear of the energy-sapping dodder of anxiety, and continue to draw on the season's spendthrift burst of golden power...