CRANE RAMPION BUCOLIC: July 2025

Ahem

A proper summer seemed to unfold and express itself haltingly from the first few days of the month, providing some of the hottest days on record in England. The whole country seems to change character for about a month sometime around the beginning of July, when the year turns back on the home straight. These are dog-days, coincident with the rise of Sirius (the dog star) at this time of year. People are different for a few weeks, especially in public. Such days often frame memorable summer events such as Wimbledon, cricket tests, international football cups, village fetes, Live Aid, the Proms, open-air rock festivals. However, the era of the annual silly season (normally mid-August) for news has long gone for want of contrast with the rest of the year.

We had Jaxon the Staffie lodging for ten days and his alert attention to all that moved in the house contrasted sharply with Max’s golden slumbers on the sofa. They have got used to each other on their morning walks, and Jaxon now knows to stop and wait each few minutes to allow Max to pad slowly into our back view towards us. Alli and I took the train up to London together (a tiger’s tooth rarity in itself) to see our good old friends Ann-Lii and Freddie together with Keith for lunch at Gordon’s Wine Bar near the Embankment, a surprise for Ann-Lii set up by Freddie. I hadn’t seen any of them for over ten years, and of course they all looked as good as before, if not even better (see masthead).

I found Tai Chi classes nearby in Ridgewood, so I enrolled for an hour a week. The precise form I am following is Shuang Yang Bai He Rou Ruan Quan, otherwise known as “frost and sun, white crane, soft and gentle flowing art”. Sounds about right. I come back rebalanced every Wednesday morning. Alli was impressed but cannot be persuaded to join me (“it’s too slow”).

One evening I was knocked up by the Labour candidate (NB for Americans – the candidate knocked on my front door) for a Council by-election vote about to close at 10pm. I was so impressed with this unexpected revival of the ancient arts of human political canvassing that I put on my shoes and beetled off to the polling station to vote for him. He lost, trailing behind the Farage Racists and the Liberal Democrats (who won). Our new neighbours Steve and Karen came round for a drink one evening so we sat in the garden in the evening sun drinking sparkling wine and getting to know each other.

I bought a new notebook computer and took it to Brighton to get advice from IT oracle Jessie on re-installing all the programmes and content from the previous one. We also went swimming in the sea, hobbling past hundreds of people in awkward clumps on the beach enjoying the late afternoon sun. The water temperature was 17.3 C, impressive for the southern sleeve of England. Jessie made a delicious Korean dinner, then I drove back to Uckfield.

Cousins Christine and Christopher visited us for lunch one afternoon. Each of them for different reasons has spent a lot of time outside the UK; Christine in New Zealand where she has lived and worked for 35 years and counting, and Christopher spreading the gospel and helping oppressed people in Russia-dominated south-eastern Europe. We talked about our shared antecedents and I both learned and imparted apparently new knowledge about them. I never knew, for example, that my paternal grandmother had been a concert pianist.

Alli and I went with Ella, just a couple of days before her birthday, to an evening entitled Wanderwild, a tour around the luscious gardens of Wakehurst, a 16^th century mansion affiliated with Kew Gardens. The evening featured drummers, actors, musicians, dancers, and other modern artists engaged in illustrating the route. I much enjoyed watching a ballet dancer appearing to walk across the lake to the bucolic background of Bruch’s violin concerto.

The starlings have been prominent across Uckfield, and often settle for a couple of minutes in their thousands on the Edwardian houses in our street from around 5 am. Loose early season murmuration is occurring, although not on the scale of their winter shows between the Brighton piers. I went to an impromptu lunch at Tun-Tuns in Brighton with Becky and her friend Casey. I had not seen Becky for a very long time. She, her sister and parents spent some holidays in La Hune with us some 25 years ago. Now over from NZ, Becky and Casey are on a working tour of England, as well as visits to Italy and France.

I went with Jessie to see Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre in London. The production had a Wild West theme which was amusing and effective. I thought it one of the best versions of the play I have ever seen. Juliet was played as a contrary streetwise sceptic: a very far cry from the soft-focus Olivia Hussey in the Zeffirelli film from 1968. Somehow, it was a perfect evening to go up to London to a play at the Globe, although I had previously been there to celebrate its opening over thirty years ago. The walk from London Bridge was also a new and illuminating experience for me, since it passed largely through a an area (Borough and Bankside) radically renovated in the past 30 years. Then it was a brutalist nightmare: dingey, dull, and dangerous. It is now as bright, vibrant, and exciting as it might have been when William Shakespeare was living and working in the same area over 400 years ago.

A few days earlier, I dog-sat Maisie in Burgess Hill (while Ella and Sam were at Wembley watching Oasis), and Alli stayed with Nanny for a few days, while I pottered around the house repositioning things. There was just time for me to go with Jessie on a boat trip to the Rampion Wind Farm, 12 kilometres out to sea from Brighton. I learned several interesting things, for example that a rampion is a small and rare  Sussex Downs flower, that the 116 giant turbines, set on a 70km2 site, produce enough green electricity to power half of all the houses in Sussex, and that the fish and other marine creatures around that site are particularly plentiful and healthy because there is no bottom-trawling. This insight by itself should pack a punch for responsible leaders, but where are they?

Here’s to teaching the torches to burn bright,

Lionel