Summer Goodbye, Summer Goodbye

Do you remember that first, poignant, descant recorder song? Listen to children playing it here and weep:
http://retrogamer.merseyworld.com/heswall/recorderrecord.htm

As, expected, every swallow and housemartin has gone today but it is still so beautiful. Tonight, at 6.3o, there are lovely alto-cirrus clouds high up and great pink cumulous low down. I picked mulberries and windfall pears, and I made a massive pan of ratatouille for the freezer. All this can take hours.

Meme:
What I am listening to is Radio 4.
What I am reading in bed is Volume II of Virginia Woolf's diaries.
What I am listening to in the car is Mark Knopfler's Kill to Get Crimson.
What I have just eaten is linguine vongole which is the easiest thing in the world if you have things like white wine and lemons handy. Just find any thin spags you have in the cupboard, and half a tin of clams, some of the onions fished out from the ratatouille, and a load of flat-leaved parsley from the greenhouse. I guess it took me 15 mins.

The parsley is a trick of mine: buy a 90p plant in the supermarket and plant it deep into good, home-made compost in the greenhouse. It always takes, and this year I have a massive load of it. That's how I always have things like coriander, basil and parsley, even if I don't get round to sowing them from seed. The other trick is to rinse it in your hand under the tap and then snip through the fat bunch again and again with big scissors -- far easier than chopping with a knife.

Yum. I am so full and happy with my linguine vongole inside me, and a white wine spritzer (drunk the second the six o'clock news comes on). Now I'm going to go out into this most magic of golden sunsets, as I have just heard that the Scots are the fattest people in Europe and that we all need to walk more. I am going to beat my little bounds.