Dreaming Midsummer and a Tricycle Named Beatrice

Northern Hemisphere Midsummer; longest day and shortest night. (Summer Solstice: June 21^st)

It’s always been a turning point in cultures and calendars throughout the ages.

This is when the sun switches from lengthening days to lengthening nights, seeming to pause in her transit of the sky for a long breath.

The earth has reached her peak growth and now it’s time to bloom.

All of spring builds towards June, the mid point of our calendars, the pinnacle of growth and canopy. The oak leaves are filled with tannins now; and will grow increasingly dark and dust-filmed. The frothy effervescence of the lane sides has taken on a heavier breath and the first hint of hay-hues creep into the fields.

Go gently on the heaths and hedge boundaries. Adders bask, and the Roe deer doe has her twin kids hidden, dappled in the shade. Brambles begin to bloom, picked over by fledgling goldfinches. Midsummer days promise runner beans and garden gates, calendula in the veg patch, and evening walks to the point on the lane where a gateway suggests a place to stand and stare. The years first fruits, and the garden’s best butterflies fresh from the meadows.

June; a maiden still, flitting on butterfly wings across the heath. July hangs slumbering by the waterway. August ripens with golden, golden glows. September’s wood-seams are richly steeped in inky bramble juice. October flames against the dying light. November gets sharpened by the first frosts cold touch. December we turn in and gather, lighting our own lights in solidarity with the sun that sits as its most diminished – a counterweight to full-fired Midsummer. Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice is my best-loved time of year, with the harvest festival of the Autumn Equinox my pinnacle highlight, (I’ve often said my favourite colour is ‘October’) but it all starts with Midsummer.

This week has been my birthday; I was a midsummer baby. (I often wonder if this is why I love the late summer and subsequent autumn: as my new eyes first learned to focus, it was full-bodied days of mists and fruitfulness – ‘Keats days’ that formed the world that greeted me.)

There were a few requests I held for my birthday; a good thunderstorm, a midsummer garden party with friends and family, to stay up with the sun into the solstice night, and a tricycle.

In the end, I willingly exchanged the thunderstorm for a morning on the beach, ate copious amounts of cake and drank home made iced teas under metres of bunting in the garden surrounded by flowers and family, beside a firepit that blazed bright into the evening, and I did indeed become the owner of a tricycle (more on that later).

Husband had some errands to run for family dependents in the morning, but it was low tide and the beach was calling. He dropped me off by the cafe, and I purchased the largest, stickiest, Belgian bun from behind the counter, for my birthday breakfast, eaten of course from the paper bag. The sky, open, bright, and blue, canopied above me as I picked my way over shingle, avoiding eye-contact with some seagulls that reminded me of school bullies loafing on the bus-stop corner. A curving sweep of white beach huts, each with a deft eye-liner stroke of coloured paint along the roof ridge, gazed out to sea engaged in their ever-long conversation with the weather. Today, it was sunshine, heat, and glint. I went in search of the sea. I found it a long way out over the sand and green seaweed, wet stones and mussel beds; over sand so saturated with seawater it jiggled and shifted as I tiptoed amongst grey rocks topped with inhabited shells, until the pools and waves merged and melded and suddenly I was ankle deep and the water swirled not just tantalisingly ahead but beside and around and behind; I was in the sea. Standing firm, but in a place that wasn’t solely land. A liquid liminal space; at once air and light and water. I tried to imprint the impression of the moment that was that place, onto my minds eye; the full face of sun, the white lift of the Little Egrets wing and trailing leg, the hard vulnerability of Periwinkle and Mussel shell, the liquid light of water that tasted of sharp salt on my tongue without a drop passing my lips.

I filled my soul (and then returned to the cafe to fill the physical with a full English breakfast, alongside my returned husband, at a window seat overlooking the beach).

A short to-and-fro discussion about what to do next, eventually led us to a family-run bike shop an hour along the coast road. I have passed this shop for years; it’s been there for decades, a true inter-generational business. The shop itself sprawls in a tangle of spokes, rust, tyres, and expertise, over the ground floors of a terrace of lime-and-brick cottages set back from the road by a pavement and cycle-path. The bikes spill out the front door onto the pavement in an assortment of frames and styles.

“One day I’ll have a tricycle!” I declared, when passing the shop on the way to a family-favourite birdwatching spot, peering out the back window of my Dad’s car. (I probably proceeded to inform my parents, who were by now used to my rambling fantasies, that I would also have a scruffy Jack Russell terrier to run alongside and would fill the back basket with picnics and books.) I was likely just single figures of age, and having never fully mastered two wheels, had been the only child in my school year to have to sit out of taking their cycling proficiency test. Well, it has taken the best part of 25 years or so, but I now own a tricycle*, complete with front wicker basket, rear wire cargo basket, and a bell. Sadly, I am yet to adopt a dog, but I do still have a penchant for picnics and books.

*My thanks to Reg, of Barreg Cycles, Chichester for his advice and service.

A few hundred metres from my doorstep, is the Centurion Way cycle-path, built along the route of the old railway branch line. So this is where I took the newly named Beatrice, for our maiden ride. Beatrice is a 32 year old, blue, Pashley Picador, and her arrival means that Sunday mornings will never be the same again. A little more practice is needed before I feel brave enough to take her out in traffic, and certainly there is some work to be done on some new muscle groups formed by the Sussex hills, but as I coasted along between Skylarks and Whitethroats, past ripening fields and hedgerows filled with pink bramble flowers and twisting bryony, I was stuck by a sense of escape I have only on rare occasions found since childhood. Every kid loves that moment of freedom when they first head out alone on their new bike; it’s just that for me, that moment came aged thirty-three.

Already I have plans to go out again – I have earmarked a potential new birdwatching patch, a hobby I have greatly missed in recent years, just five-and-a-half road-free miles from home, complete with bike rack to chain Beatrice too, and benches for a thermos of coffee and a rest, to which I plan to return very soon. It is a community park, consisting of a number of paths around lakes and reedbeds; a paradise for early morning runners, dog-walkers, birders, and local residents; created as mitigation for the environmental and community impacts of building a nearby housing estate. Standing water and wetland habitat is rare in my locality, at least within walking (or cycling!) distance, so I look forward to visiting with my binoculars and/or camera as the summer drifts into autumn and migrant birds begin to appear. Then riding home for a roast dinner, with thick glossy gravy and a dollop of home-made hedgerow jelly… ingredients foraged from the seat of a tricycle named Beatrice, and carried home in her basket.