Goodnight friends! Blazingly hot, 29°c and with hotter forecast for the rest of the week. A thin, streaky layer of tissue-thin cloud softening the blue of the sky but unable to diffuse the hot white liquid glare of the sun. Heat bounces up off pavements, bakes wild grasses to dry gold, hushed birdsong. Patches of oatgrass and orchard grass play hort to the ratcheting, buzzing music of grasshoppers. A few brief spates of drizzle after dark, but nothing is really able to dampen the heat and pressure for long.
May we recognise the skills we’ve obtained and the pressures and trials we’ve overcome to be who we are today!
Image ID: Photo of a cluster of blackberry flowers – one a white, rumpled hexafoil (one more petal than standard, which doesn’t seem too unusual anecdoteally) with a greenish centre, others fertilised and reduced to ragged bristly tufts of spent stamens, one already beginning to swell into a tight packed cluster of still-green round drupelets, each tipped with the brown thread of a style.
