Wednesday 21 June 2023
I can’t quite believe it’s the longest day already. Sunrise and sunset around the house in Scottish Borders is 04:27 and 21:58 (with no nightfall/complete darkness) and the temperature variation is predicted as 8°C to 18°C with a mix of sun, cloud and a possible hour of light rain. In Lewisham, it’s 04:42 (02:41 first light) and 21:20 (23:22 nightfall) with the temperature between 15°C and 25°C and partly cloudy.
I hadn’t realised that we were far enough north to not have full darkness for what is probably only a few weeks. I did notice at around 02:00 this morning that it wasn’t particularly dark though. (Reading this again four weeks later, I have a slight niggle I read the data incorrectly and that there is a tiny bit of nightfall – no, I have just checked and it actually seems like there was/is no full night here from 7 May to 7 August and between 6 June and 8 July it is even lighter, with no astronomical twilight even)
Yesterday, I made an arrangement with a near neighbour (about a fifteen-minute drive away) for Chris and I to visit them for dinner. I chatted to her, and briefly her husband too, at the Heyzeus grunge/rock gig (describing it/them like that does not reflect the reality of a band playing in a village hall in the middle of nowhere to an audience of thirty) Chris and I went to at the end of March. We swapped contact details, both saying we had a busy April and May ahead but that we’d make contact and meet up. I then lost the little notepad with her details on. The other day, I finally decided to commit to summer temperatures so put away my winter clothes. I found the notebook amidst my ‘very winter’ jumpers and emailed her. Chris only met them enough to say hello. I enjoyed chatting to her for five or so minutes and now we’re going round for dinner. Nothing about that whole scenario would have happened in London. Maybe surprisingly, both of us are really looking forward to spending time with them and getting to know two more people around the area.
Today, we have errands in Peebles. We have three deckchairs, a rug and a glass head (er, yes, essential) to collect from the auction house, I have an appointment to get a new tyre fitted where I appear to have a slow puncture, we have food shopping to do, both for everyday stuff and for our first dinner ‘party’ on Friday with the two friends who invited us for dinner in December and who have resident barn owls (a friend of a friend of Chris’s who happens to live in the same area as us), and we also want to try out a new coffee shop in Peebles, a branch of The Milkman in Edinburgh that we often go to in Edinburgh. I am mildly embarrassed by how excited we are to be able to go to Peebles and hopefully have a good coffee. There are, weirdly considering Peebles is quite a busy town, no non-chain coffee shops in Peebles – correction: there were no good coffee shops in Peebles. I have seen signs of one or two that have closed down in recent years though.
Now off to measure the water, which had gone down from 59cm to 52cm, which is more than we expected it to have gone down in a day and a half. Tense.
