Summer Solstice
Well, it’s only a week until the summer solstice! Sol meaning sun, and stice meaning standing still! It’s the time when the sun is farthest north of the equator than at any other time of the year! And then, only another three days until mid-summer’s day! My late god-mother’s birthday! She was a woman of small stature, not only in body but generosity. Mean as mustard and the purveyor of Spangles!
Spangles and Battenberg
Spangles were uninspiring square, fruity flavoured, boiled sweets, which came wrapped individually then encased in a paper tube. They cost three old pence (pronounced threpence) back in the fifties! Even in the days of little in the way of confectionary Spangles were boring! Not only did my god-mother bring me Spangles, she once deprived me of a piece of Battenberg Cake which fuelled my lifetime addiction to the marzipan covered pink and cream squared delight! (Which since being diagnosed as ‘weakly gluten intolerant’ I can no longer have, well not the bought variety anyway.) But I digress.
June Weather
In the last week we have had weather in varying degrees! A few mornings ago I awoke in a panic to find frost glistening on the car roof! Agh!! I rushed outside to inspect my recently planted out runner beans! Phew! Thankfully they had survived! What with slugs, snails and rabbits I can certainly do without Jack Frost lurking while I snooze!! Two days ago it was so cold we had to resort to the heater being deployed while we watched TV! In June!! The same day we were treated to the first proper rain for months! I had almost forgotten just how wet rain actually is!
June Weather in the Past
Over the last few hundred years June appears to be a month where nothing in the weather department is surprising or new. Frost killed bracken in Staffordshire in June 1911 (luckily it left my beans alone in 2011), hailstones with the circumference of 2-3 inches (5-8 centimetres in new money!) damaged crops in Britain in 1715 and in-between there appears to have been floods, droughts, heat, thunder, lightning and torrential rain! So there you go! There’s nothing new under the sun! Or Sol! As my dear old dad used to say, 'You always get some sort of weather this time of year!'
Thanks for your time! Speak soon!
The Bumpkin Rambler xx
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