Thanks TSC and back to you. It is the strangest year in my lifetime too - sometimes it feels like an apocalyptic nightmare ... then I go out for a walk, albeit mostly locally. Today along the old Wilts& Berks canal in my town, saw hazel catkins (out already), a muntjac deer in someone's back garden, a grey wagtail on the path, and loads more, all more or less in an urban setting.
And reading of course takes you someplace else. Have just started reading a paperback called 'Once Upon A River' by by Diane Setterfield. She sets the scene in a storytelling pub called the Swan at Radcot on the Upper Thames:
It was solstice night, the longest night of the year. For weeks the days had been shrinking, first gradually, then precipitously, so that it was now dark by mid-afternoon. As is well known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity from their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is the time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen. Did the solstice have anything to do with strange events at the Swan? You will have to judge for yourself.
Now you know everything you need to know, the story can begin.
Needless to say I was reeled in.
Also dipping in and out of Neil Oliver's 'Wisdom of the Ancients' - in one of his essays he has something illuminating to say about the movement of prehistoric peoples from east to west and how the Yamnaya migrants from the Russian Steppes may have brought with them more than language and metal weapons. Wound around the DNA of six of them were telltale twists of Yersinia Pestis, the ancestor of the Black Death bacterium.
Going back into prehistory is indeed therapy for the present.
All the very best to everyone
TJJ
aka June x
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