After a spring in which I was less upright and more indoors than usual, I now find myself newly attentive to the old signposts of the year.
The summer solstice is one of them. It’s today, if you’re reading this on the day of publication.
For us here in the Northern hemisphere it marks the point where we will see more of the sun than at any other point in the year – our planet is tilted over at 23.44° away from the perpendicular to our orbital plane, and at 9:24 AM on 21st June 2026 that tilt will lift the sun as high over our northern, Atlantic-lapped islands as it ever climbs.
The longest day. The shortest night. The top of the year.
It’s all downhill from here you see – and we are rather bad at remembering this.
The Cultural Summer
We speak of June as though summer is only just beginning, and in one sense it is. The school year has not yet released its prisoners. The long holiday still sits ahead, golden and oddly theoretical, even to those of us who have not had six weeks off since childhood. Wimbledon, The Game Fair, village shows, fetes, weddings, seaside traffic, barbecues, campsites, county shows, garden parties and all the social upholstery of summer are still either ahead or only just beginning to unfold.
This ‘cultural summer’ arrives later than we think, but we’re so happy to see it we quickly forget the tardiness. The sun, however, has already reached the brow of the hill.
This is the quiet insult of midsummer. We are arranging ourselves for the promised season just as the great wheel begins to turn away from it. If you were to, a few days after the solstice, point out to someone that we are closer to next Christmas than last Christmas they will look at you as though you have brought a profoundly dead stoat into the kitchen. It is not welcome information. Nor is the observation that the nights have, technically, begun to draw in. People do not want technicalities in June. They want strawberries, warm evenings and the illusion that everything expansive still lies ahead.
To be fair, the weather supports the deception. The warmest days usually come after the longest ones. Land and sea take time to gather heat, and so in most years the body experiences the ascending physicality of summer even after the light has peaked. There is no contradiction in needing a jumper on midsummer evening and then finding yourself broiled into a state of mild civic resentment in late July.
Three True Summers
Perhaps that is part of the confusion. We experience at least three true summers each year. There is the astronomical summer, marked by the old authority of sun and shadow, by the point on the horizon where the sun rises or sets that day. There is the meteorological summer, tidied into months for the convenience of charts, records and byline mentions from the Met Office. Then there is the remembered summer, the one of shared legend and community experience. The one formed by school bells, the smell of cut grass, the end of exams, the first day out of uniform, the open boot of a family car, and the sense that life has briefly been handed back to its rightful owner. That summer begins when childhood says it begins, and childhood is not easily corrected.
There is something faintly comic in this, but also something less comfortable. The solstice exposes our bad habit of wishing away the year. In winter we wait for spring. In spring we wait for summer. In summer we fear autumn. In autumn we brace ourselves for winter.
It’s no wonder that we feel that time passes more quickly as we age, as we are constantly looking ahead to what is coming without truly appreciating what we have now.
The better season?
This is not merely an outdoor worker’s complaint, though those who work in the weather have better excuses. Winter can be hard. There is no romance in pretending otherwise. Short days, wet gloves, reluctant machinery, cattle-poached gateways, frozen fingers, headtorch mornings and the permanent distribution of mud from boot to vehicle to kitchen floor can make even the stoutest soul long for May. A man can prefer June without declaring war on January, but in the midst of a winter flood or while defrosting a north-facing tap it can be difficult to summon much of a ‘sentiment des saisons.’
Yet there is a difference between preference and exile. If we treat winter as something to be endured, autumn as something to dread, and spring as nothing more than summer’s waiting room, then we have thrown away half the year before it has even reached us.
Shakespeare had a good take on this (because of course he did…). His summer’s day is not the reliable paradise we tend to remember from the first line of the sonnet.
“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
and summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”
That word, lease, is perfect. Summer is not owned, we hold it briefly, on terms we do not set and cannot negotiate.
Adlestrop
A favourite of mine is the poem Adlestrop, written by Edward Thomas – the man who inspired Robert Frost to write the better-known The Road Not Taken. It describes a fleeting moment on the trackside of a Cotswold backwater in 1914, a mere four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and Europe was plunged into conflict.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Although Thomas did not begin writing the poem until the following winter, it captures the scene of a steam train waiting at a signal and the whole country seemed to gather itself into one suspended moment: grass, meadowsweet, haycocks, willow-herb and birdsong. Nothing happened, which is often when the year reveals most.
Thomas died in the fields of France on Easter Monday, 9th April 1917.
The Waning of Spring
The year is not a sequence of poetic moods and scenes arranged for our benefit. It is a working, cyclical machine. It flowers, seeds, fattens, sheds, rots, rests and begins again. By late June, the countryside is not awakening – it is showing the earliest signs of fatigue. The may flowers of hawthorn have passed, you are too late for the good elderflowers and the grasses are seeding. Bracken has become a dominant regime on under-managed hillsides, and young birds are out and loud. The first and even second silage has been taken in many places, and the lanes have that particular summer mixture of dust, diesel, cow parsley and the Germolene-like fug of sun-warmed meadowsweet.
This is why May and June matter the most to me, and why September and October matter almost as much. They are hinge months, full of movement. In May and early June, the year is still climbing. Everything is urgent, verdant, green, edible and newly arrived. In September and October, the light lowers and the land begins to offer different things: fungi, berries, nuts, fruit, seed, the first true woodsmoke, the first morning mist laid over river meadows like something placed there by delicate hand. The shoulder seasons have a beauty sharpened by their own departure.
I sometimes feel, in those months, a faint anxiety that I am not appreciating them enough. It is an absurd pressure, but a real one. You stand in a field under long evening light, or look across a river meadow at morning mist, and part of the mind is already mourning what is still in front of you. The thing has not gone, but its going is part of its presence. Perhaps that is what makes it beautiful. Perhaps that is merely what time feels like when you are paying attention.
Wheels Upon Wheels
I have always imagined time spatially. A week is a circle, beginning and ending on Sunday. A year is a much larger wheel, lying horizontally somewhere in the mind, with previous years stacked beneath it and the years ahead suspended above. I had assumed everyone carried some version of this arrangement until repeated questioning revealed that many people do nothing of the sort. Some see time as a straight line. Some feel it as a list. Some apparently do not see it at all, which I try not to hold against them.
There is a name for the stronger versions of this: time-space synaesthesia, or sequence-space synaesthesia, where months, numbers, days or years appear to occupy positions in space. I do not know if my own private cartwheel qualifies, and I am not especially keen to have it examined too closely. It is enough to know that the year has shape, a cycle. It rises, turns, falls and returns. The solstice is not a slogan about wellbeing or a chance to dress as a druid and haunt a stone circle. It is a marker. You are here, at this point in time, space and soul.
And here is not a bad place to be.
At the top of the year, the temptation is to feel cheated. Just as we arrive at summer, the light begins its retreat. Just as the evenings seem endless, their end has already been written into them. But that is only a tragedy if we mistake the year for a ladder. It is not. It is a wheel.
The better response is not to grip harder at June, nor to pretend that February rain is just as pleasant as elderflower in a warm hedge. It plainly is not. The better response is attention. To give each season its due. To stop treating winter as failed summer, autumn as decline, and spring as a corridor leading to the only room in the house worth entering.
Summer may be easiest to love. That does not make the rest of the year a test of endurance. The wheel is turning, as it always has. Our task is not to stop it, but to notice where we are upon it.
