After complaining enough about those long days of rain in winter and early Spring, it’s only fair to recognise these long days of sunshine through later Spring. Long days of unusually deep blue skies, often cloudless, or if there are clouds, they appear so faint, the most delicate of feathers, or the slightest smudge of white paint from an artist’s brush. These vivid blues have been matched by vivid greens: trees suddenly, thrillingly, in full leaf. After so many weeks of looking down to keep my head out of the rain, I have the chance to look up and enjoy the transformation: these trees were bare skeletons what felt like just a couple of weeks ago.
Add vivid oranges to those vivid blues and greens as well: The deep glow of a setting sun, not the pale orangeish, yellowish throws of winter. From a distance, I can see long shadows cast by trees across empty fields, like striped tigers emerging to prowl in the dying hours of the day, before merging back into darkness as night falls. Up close, the same dying sun splits into millions of tiny shards as it refracts through the whites and yellows of flowers on the banks of the Thames, stage lighting to accompany a quiet evening walk or the perfect backdrop for an early season cricket match.
This kind of England – for a few weeks at least – is dreamlike: there are few places I’d rather be than here. Thoughts of distant mountains are put on hold, for now; there’s just the impatient urge to be out more. Those greens, blues, oranges, yellows, and whites as you picture how the countryside should always be: England of its rural past and not so much of its increasingly urban and concrete reality.
Walks at this time of year reveal views across fields in early growth of crops, or meadows scattered with the flickering lights of buttercups and dandelions, hedgerows that conceal narrow lanes, and old cottages, upstairs windows peeping out above those hedges like owls’ eyes. These views will be little unchanged from a century ago, and as I walk, I try to put myself in the shoes of travel writers of that time: there’s something about the simplicity and wonder of their travels in lands near and far that capture a similar dreamlike spirit for me.
And yet I fear these dreams are too soon starting to fade. I feel like my parents, wondering when the next rain is going to come, to help keep these colours alive for longer (and help my garden to grow). I’m desperate to bottle these moments before they are gone for another year: already, many fields have taken on a paler yellowish tint, the earth is being baked to brown, rock hard and cracked, and whips of wind blow the dust into miniature sandstorms. This wave of nostalgia for a past that I never really saw is turning into a sepia reality before my eyes.
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