Goodnight friends! Highs of 34°c today, and still over 20° well past midnight. The frail tissue clouds have dissolved away, leaving the dripping molten white sun to blaze unimpeded, washing out half the empty pale blue sky. Stone and tarmac pavements aren’t just radiating slight reflected warmth, but uncomfortablly hot to the touch. Flowers crumple and wilt, some mophead hydrangeas withering away before their pink-blushing petals have ever fully bloomed. Purple knapweed and firebrand orange fox-and-cubs flowers sway gently on a breath of wind like the brushes of listless painters. The surge of bright heat seems to have supercharged the blackberries, sudden thumb-thick prickly tendrils lunging a metre or more out of the hedge in just a few days.
A little less wrung out than usual after the shorter judo session, though some specific twinges in my back from a lot of harai and hane goshi drilling. I have my next jiu-jitsu stripe and my orange belt now though, so it feels like a worthwhile soreness. Not much activity for me, a brief walk trying to skip from shade to shade, then a lovely low-key dinner date night with my girlfriend. She got into coleslaw while we were on holiday, so we are on week 2 of the summer of slaws. This time it was ginger sesame apple slaw on a vegan burger, and we did a great job, really felt like one of those delicious but needlessly upscale burgers with a wooden stake you have to unhinge your jaw for.
May we find a sense of playfulness and exhuberant joy in our lives today!
Image ID: Photo of a churchyard beneath a very pale sunwashed blue sky, tall wild grasses in a patchwork of greens and golds half-swallowing gravestones, their angular facets picked out in deep shadow by a broad white blaze of sunlight.
