Summer - Making Memories

It is here, at last, the moment we’ve been waiting for. Proper sultry, summer weather of hot sun and blue skies from dawn until dusk, which is around nine-thirty, and I would like to say it goes on day after day. It won’t. I think this is two days of heatwave, then rain, possibly storm, and cooler temperatures. My house is currently thirty-four degrees and I feel sticky and uncomfortable.  The heatwave may not be completely responsible.  After two and a half years of sticking to guidelines and looking out for myself and family, Covid has got me. I tested positive at the weekend after feeling unwell for a couple of days. There are no signs of recovery yet. When it cools down, I’ll rest in the garden, admiring the fruits of my labours, especially the planter I’ve called Tangerine and White.

The summers of our youth were everlasting and full of ice cream, the park, the beach and sometimes a holiday. Our holidays tended to be spent with family, when my dad could escape from running the pub for more than two days together. It was always good to spent time with our cousins. They are in the USA now, but they lived in London and the south of England when we were all children. My sister and I loved their big garden offering lots of room to play, even space for badminton.

For years home was a pub on South Promenade. We had the beach on our doorstep. Day after day we were there, not a care in the world and not a thought for how lucky we were. Someone would be with us until I, being the eldest, was considered old enough to take us across four lanes of traffic and the tramlines. My sister would choose an ice lolly or ice cream. I loved a portion of shrimps in a tiny paper bag. I can still taste how delicious they were. Better than anything sweet.

When our children were young, summer holidays meant the long road trip to Pembrokeshire and a couple of weeks staying in a static caravan. It was owned by family members who didn’t use it during the busy months of July and August, but were very happy for us and others to enjoy it. We were so privileged. We had holidays that wouldn’t have happened if not for the generosity of our extended family. Our children, and us have great memories of those wonderful times.

Making memories is what we’ll be doing in a few weeks when we take our grown up children and all our grandchildren to have a blast at Butlin’s. It’s our treat as grandparents and a one-off. It will be fun for all of us, of course, but it is centred on giving the grandchildren a fabulous time. My grandparents used to take me to Butlin’s when I was small, before I had a sister. Now I’m the nanna. It’s my turn.

Allow me the indulgence of my favourite of Shakespeare’s sonnets,

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Love Bites - Blotting My Copy Book

 

I had done what my dad would refer to as ‘Blotted my copy book’. I’d been there before but this time I’d excelled myself in the ‘What has she done now?’ misdemeanours and no amount of wide-eyed fictional protesting could talk me out of this situation or lessen the impact.

Returning home after two weeks away in Europe with school friends, I was exhausted after a lengthy over-land journey but still on a high and buzzing with enthusiasm to share thoughts on where I’d been. I thought they, my family, would be pleased to see me. I was naïve. Worse, I’d been stupid. Caught up in a moment fuelled by Slivovitz and the sultry, open air discotheque and, yes, of course it was my own fault.

“I hope you weren’t getting up to what I was doing when I got love bites!”  There was a hint of a snigger from the barmaid. I’d just dragged my suitcase through the pub door and she could see me from the bar. She was only a year older than me, married to my dad’s cellar man and had a baby daughter. She was lovely. She’ll never know how much.

My story was more innocent than her story implied. Mine was no more than a dare in Opatija. Who can get the biggest, reddest love bite out of the four of us up for it. We had become friendly – and it was just friendly – with some lads from a posh boarding school. Everything  above board and respectable, apart from the awful love bites.

Following the passing of my mother and re-marriage of my father, our family dynamics had changed considerably and everything familiar and comfortable to me had gone. It is hard enough to be a teenage girl without complications of where you fit in, where you belong.

It wasn’t many minutes into my arrival before the proverbial hit the fan. My dad was speechless. Even he couldn’t stand my corner on this one. His wife, with a ‘How dare you do this to us’ headless chicken routine, throwing in to my dad, ‘I knew she’d do something, I told you.’

I don’t suppose it helped when I reassured them that the love bites will have gone long before I go back to school and meanwhile, I’ll dab them with Witch Hazel and hide them with makeup, better than I have done.

I didn’t fit in and I didn’t belong, but for the time being I had a good friend in the barmaid who was always there for me and wanted me to do well for myself, not be tied down like she thought she was. Life goes on and we’ve both done ok.

By the way, love bites are disgusting and I promise I haven't had any since!

I’ve chosen poems that are not love-bite related, but take me back to that summer and remind me of my fascination with the poets concerned.

Love’s Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine? –

See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822


She Walks In Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron 1788 - 1824


Thanks for reading, Pam x

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