As the impending heat-wave threatens much of Great Britain with the first ever red warning issued by the Met office I cast my eyes back to past summers. Naturally all youthful summers are remembered as being glorious, especially those spent under canvas with the scout troop. I really don’t seem to remember any rain-spoilt-play days then.
The highest temperature so far recorded in the UK is 38.7 C, at Cambridge Botanic Garden on July 25, 2019. Many of us well remember the blazing summer of 1976 when the country baked in a ten-week heat wave and faced the worst drought in 250 years.
I was then living in Lolworth, a small village off the Huntington road (A14) eight miles north of Cambridge.
During the summer I had an open-air job assisting surveyors taking measurements for the widening of the A14. After work I would cool myself walking in the woodland beyond the village near Boxworth. On one of these walks I was joined by friends from London who had become involved with Emin, a spiritual movement based on the work of Raymond Armin, known to members as “Leo”.
I hugged my first tree as a result but little knew that the following summer would bring a greater prize to hug. And this takes me to India. Why is it that the former jewel in the crown has become such an important time-marker in my life as far as matters concerning love are concerned?
It was after a New Year’s Eve party:
that I left England during my gap year to pursue the fabled hippy trail to India and the Himalayas. Again, it was at the end of my spell at University that I took a flight to India for a long stay. It was, once more, a friend from India who I met in Lolworth some years later. But where was the matter concerning love? Connecting those life-phases with India is one essential person: Sandra, my wife. For it was her I took to that New Year’s Eve party. And it was her I met and serenaded at university before flying to the sub-continent.
(Sandra at my digs in Kings Parade . Me playing the guitar taken on the hippy trail)
It was also my friend from Assam who brought Sandra to Lolworth where he took the first photograph of us together on the staircase of ‘Redlands’:
Could we two continue to meet by pure chance every five years and then part again for another five years? What was there that drew us back to each other? Surely this couldn’t carry on this way for ever?
(Sandra feeding a friend we rode on in Kerala)
I now realise more than ever that our fate is written in the stars. There is a level of consciousness beyond our rational understanding that acts on our behalf like a godly automatic pilot steering us on our course. We should accept that or otherwise dissolve into a futile existence. I sincerely believe there is a prime mover in these things. It is called Kismat and it’s Kismat that has united us within a cosmic road map leading towards the stars from whence we came.
And that returns me to heat-wave summers…but then, of course, a temperature of 42 degrees in Florence this coming week is not worth too much attention when compared to a pre-monsoon Delhi which can reach 50 degree. And as for the UK I just wonder how the inhabitants of those thin-walled, un-air conditioned, big-windowed dwellings will fare? Will it be a sensible reaction or will it be as the song goes ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’?
How nature shakes us up… Is there anyone left on the planet who still disbelieves in climate change I wonder?