August: the most spiritually dark month that doesn’t happen in winter. Everything is scruffy and angry and moist, waiting for September and October to come in to crisp it up and prettify it again. Chunks of crumbling wood in the lanes. A tree has come down on my route home from work so I’m having to go the long way around for now, which isn’t such a great hardship as it gives me a better view of the tor, or at least it would, if it wasn’t still raining for 70 per cent of each day. It feels like all this rain and wind is coppicing the countryside, knocking the excess wood off it. I detect a pinch of autumn in the air already and it is not too warm for a night-time fire. I gather kindling from up the lane. There’s plenty. I avoid the stuff on the ground, favouring the bits caught high up in fences and branches, which is always drier. Today, in the middle of all the sogginess, we had three hours of brilliant sunshine, and I took advantage by doing some tidying in the garden and digging out a new bed. At least I have no trouble getting a spade in now. As I go down through the earth I feel like I am burrowing through tiers of history. Rabbit skulls, shards of pottery and thin old hand-forged nails turn up, and some bigger stuff, which I do my best to upcycle, such as a baffling rusty bracket, about two feet in length, with another baffling chain attached to it. I jammed this into one of the endless crevices in the wall and hung a bird feeder on it. Some primal instinct kicks in as I dig further and get more dirty and scratched up, some innate understanding of compost, something there in me from birth, always just waiting to be unleashed. Time stops being conventionally measured. Through the open window I heard Reka talking on speakerphone to one of her sisters in Budapest, which – possibly in part because of all the extra letters in the Hungarian alphabet – always sounds more like seven people having a conversation than two. Later, I hear her singing. Folk songs from her home country. I have loaned her the old acoustic guitar I inherited from Mum. I called it a loan, but she can keep it, as I doubt it will be any use to me ever again.