Thursday 23rd Aug 2007
It’s a rare beautiful evening filled with crisp air following on from a beautiful sunny day. The birds are singing and the breeze is gently rustling the yellowing leaves in the tall sycamore tree. Mr Mouse has put in an appearance and for this one rare evening I can sit with the laptop out in the garden with a glass of “Turning Leaf”. (It’s like blackcurrant juice for grownups.) There are so many things to see in this handkerchief of a yard such as a snail laconically moving in the shade of the wall perpendicular to the growth of the clematis leaving a trail of silver across the magnolia wall. The insects that ride on the cool dusk air and caress me in their itchy embraces of annoyance. It is now almost time for the alates to take flight once again and I imagine them huddled below the earth awaiting the destiny of millennia that brings them again to this month. To the never ending cycle of renewal that marks August and the release of a million fertile queens into the air to mate and take harbour in safe and secret places ready to found new spring dynasties. Never more so the wasp and bee queens who carry the existence of a species in a tithe of their summer strength. Who survive without armies and servants all alone in warm and dark crevices till the days change again and the world is made anew. I have no army, nor servants and founded no dynasty and yet I feel I know why they can do nothing only but survive. As I have and will, to see many more August alates take flight and seal the world in harmony.