August 31st
Goodnight August! How wonderful you’ve been. As ever I did not get everything done that I thought I would while you were here, but for once that is because I set us too much, not because I have slacked about lazily. Thank you. There’s been singing and recorders and composing and arranging and art and family and owls and bullfinches and castles and beaches and lakes and cakes. I did not waste your last day either – I made the video of The Felton Sycamores, finished off the All We Like Sheep transcription, recorded Bob being Oliver Cromwell, and met a proposal deadline.

August 30th
Following a day of computery toil, punctuated by salad and record-breaking cricket on the radio, off we both went to Mouldshaugh for madrigal singing with some of our village buddies. ‘Twas such a delightful day that we were fixed on walking there – only half an hour at most. The farmers were harvesting their grains and making bales, and the clouds were exceedingly shapely, which caused us to slow down and look. This all meant we arrived on time and there was much jollity in the madrigalling. When we walked back it was very dark indeed as more cloud had come over and the sun had completely gone off to the Southern Hemisphere, and Mouldshaugh is in the middle of nowhere, and also, the farmers were still out shining big harvesting lights in our eyes. This all caused us much merriment – we larked about when we finally got back to the streetlights. Earlier, in the computery part of the day I had had quite a bit of cheering feedback about this song, which coincidentally features walking and merriment.

August 29th
Brilliant, brilliant day. Up for the sunrise and off with Jamie to Blyth to look at the tall ships before they head off to Sweden. Turbines, sails, flags, banners, rigging, sun. Off to Whitley bay on a telephone box hunt – a K4 – very rare, located outside the railway station. We notice the front number plate is missing, possibly following an altercation with an early morning rabbit. Home we go. Phone calls with friendly policemen. One heads off to Halfords to get a new one while the other does a bit of sheep music. Singing with five of Lionheart Harmony at the church fair in Alnmouth. We have a merry practice beforehand – all the issues you hear were ironed out in the performance. Ice creams on the way back to the car at Alnmouth Station. Home again for pie and peas and a documentary about Van Gogh’s ear. Off to consort with local recorders. I got to play Rebekah’s bass – a stretchy challenge for fingers and brain, which doesn’t equate recorder playing with reading the bass clef. But so very exhilarating getting it right after a while. I’m so loving August.

August 28th
I have driven home from Worksop through more Bank Holiday Weekend traffic and I have channelled my inner Ice-man Kimi Raikkonen to remain calm, avoid collisions, and make it safely to the finishing line, while all about me were bobbins of the highest order channelling their inner Max Verstappen hot-headedness by weaving in and out of lanes, overtaking on the left and right (sometimes both, and sometimes from the exit lane), slamming on their brakes, realising at the last minute from the fast lane that their exit is only metres away and heading straight for it no matter what, and trying to negotiate their swaying caravans above the speed limit through road-works and narrow lanes which are only 2 cm wider than their vehicles. I was listening to the Belgian Grand Prix at the time and when Kimi started swearing down the radio at the reckless Max, my empathy was complete. Pah to the A1 bobbins and Max Verstappen.

August 27th
Popular echinops. Hardware shop giggling with Dad. Afternoon cricket and Handel combo. Thunder tracking on the laptop (it veered away from Worksop as the cricket reached its conclusion).

August 26th
Bank Holiday weekend traffic jams. Being in them, feeling slightly irked. Driving past worse ones on the northbound side, feeling jauntier. Sunset beyond the chimneys of Spring Walk. A song I wrote which is one of my favourites, because I did not record the sounds of the traffic jams.

August 25th
I opened a drawer (6ft x 3ft under the spare bed) of fabric today intent upon the sewing. It was so overflowing with splendid remnants and things to repair or transform that it somewhat overwhelmed me, so I went for the “arranging a sheep song for choir” option instead. I took no photos either, but I have this spare from the stone skimming of the night before.

August 24th
Jamie skims stones on the flat sea at sunset as a yacht chugs by with no wind to help it. The waves form at the last second before bumping into the beach.

August 19th- 22nd – Four days in the Lake District.
Beware of Branches
Two sisters walk to Grange. The path is flooded so we take to the road edges. We eat lunch at Grange and catch the open-topped bus back to Keswick. We deliberately put ourselves in harm’s way attempting take pictures of branches about to whack us. We are full of mirth. Later there are cheesecakes with Colin, Fran, and Jamie. The neighbour’s son practises his drumming. Jamie and I drive home in the gloaming.

A rainy day in picturesque Cockermouth.
The floorboards in the galleries and antique shops creak and squeak. The paint on Gaynor’s favourite colourful, drainpipe peels artily.

Fruit and Cake.
The men on the fruit stall in Keswick encourage us to buy their fruit at the end of a market day. The next day we survey the busy scene on the same spot from the upstairs of The Wild Strawberry. It’s Colin, Gaynor, Frances and Cheryl beaming happily. Excellent coffee (it was reported to me – I can report from first hand that the tap water was cool and refreshing), and excellent cakes, and excellent service from the cheery Colin. If you go to Keswick, then that would be the place to take your daytime refreshments, I’d say

August 18th
I must say I’m loving August very much indeed. Today I awoke fully at a very silly time, so put the finishing touches to the safely grazing sheep, made an arrangement of some French sheep, watched a bit of Olympics, then went back to bed. For the second getting-up I notated another sheep song from a recording, then off to kooky Chillingham Castle with Gaynor for the afternoon where we went bat crazy. I was very taken with the weather vane and the clock in the “museum”. We heard it chiming at 2pm, but my machine was not fade-in ready so I raced back there mid-cheese-scone at 3pm, encountering a Scottish man saying something about blunderbusses on one of the spiral staircases. It’s supposedly the most haunted castle in England and one if-I-talk-loud-enough-someone-will-notice-me little girl was spooked by the tales the very friendly guides told. A glorious day rounded off with an exceedingly merry Lionheart Harmony rehearsal, with lots of diary mirth in which none of us could remember everything we’d been told, sometimes less than a minute after we’d been told it, and Gwyn gamely attempted to school us in our Myfanwy Welsh.

August 17th
When I was taking pictures of the rippley sunrise the other day, I was also quite taken with my old friend the “wreck of rusty, crusty iron” which features in one of my children’s songs. I was so busy with the sheep safely grazing though that I didn’t do anything fade-inny about it. However, now the sheep are penned, I had a bit of search through my recordings and found this – the lyrics are not clear, so I will attend to that later. In the meantime:
Joanna went to the beach one windy day, to Warkworth Beach.
What did she see? What did she find?
One wreck of rusty, crusty iron,
Two logs along the waterline,
And she felt the sand between her toes.
….Three showy, blowy sailing boats,
Four walking sticks with furry coats….

August 16th.
Sheep may safely graze, or they may not, but they’ve got a better chance of it in G major than B flat, I think. Out came my treble recorder for this after many a year, and it seems that my fingers haven’t completely forgotten where to put themselves, although they do switch to descant fingering when there’s a page turn or a large leap. The Bridge Singers will be no doubt happy to have a smidgeon more Bach in their Christmassy sheep-fest, and the tenors will be bleating very happily on the tune. Elsewhere, my camera would not focus on this drip of dew on the marram grass, but instead noticed a delightful little circular rainbow.

August 15th
Ripples, gulls and terns. The tide was on its way out leaving this ripply pool, the sun was rising on the horizon, the waves were crashing in the distance. There were loads and loads of gulls and terns, diving and circling, and also lots of cobles heading for the same bit of sea – there was something under there that had taken all their fancies. Elsewhere, I triumphantly completed a very tricky Jigsaw Sudoku, which has been causing mathematical frowns over the last few days.

August 14th
Nice Sunday with Jamie. A bit of sheep music and data analysis, a bit of weeding, a bit of Olympics, a bit of cooking, a bit of napping. Lots of Olympics, actually. GB won five gold medals and a few silvery ones too today which was thrilling. Watching the pommel final makes my arms ache, I discover.

August 13th
A teensy bit B Festival at Bamburgh Castle. Too loud, windy and boomy for my machine. We sang with Lionheart Harmony. It was OK. Elsewhere – delicious lunch at The Percy Arms in Chatton, enjoying the Olympics, not enjoying the cricket.

August 12th
I had a new bottle of rum to open. I had a rum and coke. I made an apricot and chocolate vegan cake and took it to a gathering of singy friends. We chatted and laughed and sang and ate and it was merry.

August 11th
There was barbershopping this evening, but on the whole a quiet day, so here’s some of last Saturday’s jigging about with The Bridge Singers.

August 10th
Back home via meetings at The Hepworth in Wakefield for workshops coming up in September. Loved the Clyde shipyard pictures in Gallery 10 by Stanley Spencer – these will be my focus for a new song, I think. It’s been a while since I wrote a shipbuilding song! Here’s a bit of riveting and the end of Maggie’s Rant about the end of shipbuilding on the Wear in Sunderland.

August 9th
Having driven to Worksop during the morning, and boosted by pie for lunch, Mum and I walked into town to see what was what in the ‘Sop, and what we found was a school holiday display by the Heritage Ambulance Society and some other emergency services at the library. They were just packing up alas, but we just managed to catch the end of one of their ambulance show-and-tells with some tiny people. Sirens-through-the-ages was a particular treat.

August 8th
I went up to the sycamores at sunrise because the crop was down and there were haystacks, so now I can take pictures from the middle of the field not just the edge. The stubbly remains of the crop go snickety-snack as you walk through them. There was a massive assemblage of swallows on the lines as I walked back through the village. Another early riser and I chatted upon this theme, before heading home.

August 7th
I awoke at 4am to the sound of the owls through the windows again, so this time I went outside to investigate. I could hear two and they were out in the trees around the back garden, so I left the machine recording them in the yard and climbed the darkened steps with the camera to see if I could see them in flight. No. However, this lily was bobbing about in the wind, and the recording machine, out of the wind, did its thing. I wrote a song with an owl verse once. Here’s that verse with the actual owls:
Our hoolets glide in the soft night air,
With a tootery, watcherly clever-me-ree
See the shine of their eyes in the headlights’ glare
As they gleamily, glidily swoop to ensnare
A mouse as it scamperly flees.

August 6th
Early morning cleaning, Alnwick International Music Festival with The Bridge Singers and fan club/photographer Gaynor, the sounds from the conductor’s stand (tuning fork, giving of notes, encouragements, singing along, not singing along, wind-blown sheets of music, making sure everyone knows which song we’re singing next, applause), conductor over-heating in full August sun, trip home for changing into non-choir-kit, Amble to gather fish and chips, Warkworth Beach to eat fish and chips in the sun, walk along the beach and back, no shoes, warm sand, not-freezing North Sea, tartan limpet merriment, dropping off in Wooler, back to Felton, change into non-beach kit, drink and nibbles with some neighbours, a spot of Olympic cycling on the telly. Nothing organised for Sunday. Zzzzz.

August 5th
Waking from my sleep at 1.30am, I opened the window to hear these owls, so I raced to my machine and another window and stuck the machine out through the window in the direction of the river, and pressed record. My dearly-departed next door neighbour Ted always used to speak enthusiastically of the hoolets he watched and heard as he had his night-time cigarettes outside in the back yard, but I’ve never heard them so loud, nor so many. I did not see any owls last night, but I did see this stone one recently at Wallington Hall, near the walled garden. Fully awake after this excitement, I spent another hour listening to these owls through the open window before drifting back to sleep. Beautiful lullaby.

August 4th
Walking from the car park at Alnmouth Station to Nether Grange Hotel for our Lionheart Harmony gig: oystercatchers, curlews, cars, geese, steps, dog-walkers, riverside, St. John The Baptist’s 6 o’clock chimes.

August 3rd.
Scraping the moss from the paving and bricks in the back yard, as I did on and off throughout most of the day, I was periodically aware of people in the holiday let next door watching me from within. I feigned interest in a bird on their low roof and caught sight of someone stepping back from the darkened window. Their door was also open and occasionally I could hear their carefree, holiday merriment. They are no doubt delighted that they have left their moss-scraping duties behind for a week. I have not yet completed this task, and it will no doubt be next week’s visitors who reap the visual benefits of my efforts with the short-term back-yard sub-plan.

August 2nd
I wake up early. I get dressed. I head outside, water the barrels on the bridge, and take pictures of a fossicking heron, the phone box, the spiders’ webs glinting in the rising sun on the new bridge, a darting wagtail, one of Anne’s shortbread biscuits, which I then eat. I make a plan. I eat the last of the cheese scones for breakfast as we still have no breakfast food. I embark on four loads of washing. I reply to emails, I head out and do weeding and pruning, I finish off one of my sheep transcriptions for The Bridge Singers, (Phyllis here, is a shepherdess). I fashion our inherited small-leaved plant into a quirky three-pronged topiary of almost-spheres. I chat to the neighbour and twiddle her dog’s chin (which the dog seems to like as she sticks her chin into my hand whenever I see her.) I do more weeding and pruning and formulate a short-term sub-plan for the back yard. I use my imagination to concoct something interesting from the meagre contents of our cupboards, freezer and garden for lunch. Jamie works away on his phone calls and graphs. I start to put away my musical detritus from Sunday’s workshops. I do more weeding and pruning and a bit of computery pottering, which results in someone wanting to sing my song Push The Boats Out. We head north to look at possible plants for the short-term sub-plan, and also brave the holiday supermarket. We come back with quite a varied selection of provisions including a pot of eat-me-now-or-else-I’ll-go-off prawn cocktail, which we munch while watching Clare Balding interview Jessica Ennis-Hill. Then I sleep. August is no longer passing me by.

August 1st
I wake up early. I potter about. All the things I thought I’d do in August because I have nothing I must do, do not now seem appealing. I make cheese scones because there is nothing for breakfast. We eat. I go back to sleep. I am so very tired. Jamie works away with his phone calls and graphs. I sleep. I potter about. I do not answer emails. We eat more cheese scones at lunchtime because there is no food and I cannot be bothered. I nap. I potter about. Men arrive with noisy machines from Northumbrian Water. The dashboard on their noisiest machine is right outside my pottering window. It is a colourful machine and has a little whale on it. They go. I potter. The doorbell rings and I must answer it because Jamie is on the phone. It is lovely Anne. She brings cheeriness, and shortbread in a phone box, and we chat. I am slightly revived, so I do more pottering. Someone walks along the gravel in the river bed. We watch a documentary about the artist Georgia O’ Keefe. She was full of vim and spirit. I am weary. We watch a film about Ken Loach and eat some shortbread. He has fire in his belly and it is tasty. I am so sleepy. I sleep.