A Cherished Day to Be Alive

There is a particular slant of summer light that lands in this corner of England and makes you believe, even if only for an hour, that the world isn’t quite as fractured as you feared. When dawn comes hammering at the curtains with its brazen light, there’s no dignified retreat. It insists you rise, insists you look out across the barley fields already bleached to the colour of old parchment. The air itself smells warm, as though the hedgerows have exhaled in relief after a year spent holding their breath.

The news, always the news, can wait. It will wait, crouched in the corners of your mind, ready to strike when the quiet recedes. The alarms about melting ice caps and collapsing governments, the ceaseless chatter of scandal and outrage, can be postponed until the sun retreats. For now, the summer rules all with a tyranny so benevolent you would be a fool to resist it. It governs you without force, without threat, only with the simple, unarguable fact of its heat. You step outside barefoot, not because you planned to but because the morning draws you out without ceremony. The first shock of warmth seeps through the soles of your feet, a reminder that your body still belongs to this earth and not the pallid glow of a screen. The grass is already warm, the air already scented with cut hay and the faint sweetness of wildflowers that no council has yet mown into oblivion.

You stand there for a moment longer than you meant to, feeling your shoulders drop their guard. It is as if every fretful thought you have been nursing, every grim prediction about the world’s unraveling, simply evaporates in the soft burn of the morning. The heat touches you with something that feels almost intimate, as though it knows your secret fears and has decided to forgive them. The dog circles your ankles with the insouciance of an animal who has never known the burden of tomorrow. You envy this. You envy it so completely that you almost laugh out loud. And for a few precious minutes, before the world finds you again, you are as light and untroubled as she is.

Here in the South West, in this patchwork of Constable’s palette and Hardy’s bruised imagination, the weather is a capricious monarch. One moment it is all generosity, flooding the fields with honeyed light that settles on every leaf and stone with a tenderness that feels almost deliberate. The next moment it gathers a procession of sullen clouds, the kind that drift in silently and threaten to break the spell with a sudden gust or a half-hearted rain. The wind shifts without warning, carrying with it the scent of warm earth mingled with something sharper, something electric that hints at change.

Even so, these months have a languorous beauty that no drizzle can quite erase. The afternoons spill out in slow motion, the heat laying its heavy hand across the land until even the crows lose their urgency. The hours seem to dilate, growing loose around the edges. Time becomes elastic, drifting out toward the hedgerows and then pulling back in again, as if the day itself cannot decide whether to begin or to end. You find yourself suspended in this indecision, content to wait, content to watch the barley nod in the breeze and the shadows crawl across the fields. Here, for once, nothing demands your haste.

I live in the shadow of Stonehenge, that ancient crown of stones, older than empires and every king who ever thought himself immortal. Anyone who has stood before it will understand the odd humility it provokes—the way it shrinks your troubles to something manageable. This morning, walking the dog along the track that skirts the edge of those fields, I found myself stopping more than once. Not because the dog had paused, but because the sight of it all—the endless roll of barley, the nodding thistles, the battered fence line—simply took my breath away. It felt absurd, this wave of gratitude. And yet I surrendered to it without apology.

This is the season when the many shades of green reveal themselves with no shame. The dark green of the oaks, sturdy and unmoved by fashion. The bright, almost insolent green of new hedges. The blue-green of the barley stalks still clinging to some memory of rain. The soft, milky green of young nettles growing where no gardener thought to look. Each of them reminding you that life is a thousand variations on the same theme: persistence.

I find that summer makes me fall back in love with myself. Not in some cheap, narcissistic preening. Nothing so shallow. More like a recognition that I am still here, still capable of wonder. When the heatwave settles over this county like a thick quilt, I remember what it means to be a body in the world. I remember the quiet temerity it takes to feel contentment in an age when contentment is almost a moral failing.

Some would call this insouciance. As though paying attention to the simplest pleasures, the warming of your limbs and the rasp of dry grass against your ankles, was some small betrayal of the larger struggles that howl beyond the hedgerows. As though taking a moment to marvel at the way the light slips through a gap in the trees, or pausing to watch the dog chase a moth across the baked track, is an act of selfishness. There is an unspoken accusation that to find contentment in these ordinary marvels is to turn your back on the restless ache of the world.

I don’t accept that premise. It is no treachery to love your life, no quiet crime to recognise the goodness still threaded through your days. It is no heresy to delight in a morning that asks nothing of you but your presence, in a sky so blue it feels almost impertinent, in the soft animal joy of being warm and unhurried. If anything, these small acts of attention are a declaration. A refusal to let the darkness consume every corner of the mind. A quiet, stubborn insistence that life, even in its raw and bruised state, is worth noticing.

In the end, I suspect it is this capacity to feel joy in the face of uncertainty that keeps us from turning bitter. To find the day beautiful, to claim it as your own, is not a betrayal. It is survival.

You sit out in the evening, a glass of something cold in your hand, and watch the sun bleeding itself across the far ridge of fields. You watch the crows shift and rise in a ragged choreography. You watch the last swallows scissoring the sky. And you know that this is temporary, that soon the season will slip into its envoi.

The greens will recede. Their riot of colour will concede to the rust and ochre of autumn—the slow surrender of chlorophyll to gravity. The barley fields will turn from the blue-green of early promise to the brittle yellow of finality. The leaves will come down in flurries of bronze and saffron, and the heat that once demanded you seize the day will soften into something more reflective.

And yet, in this hour, summer remains. It fills the lungs and the bones with the sweet, absurd hope that life, even in its most ordinary guise, can feel like a form of triumph.

What a cherished day to be alive.