I am now back at the Old Rectory. It is stinking hot today. There is little difference between today in Hampshire, mid-August, and a hot summer’s day in Oz. It’s harvest time in the country. The fields are alive with activity. Like bees swarming over honey.

Nicky Barber is harvesting at her farm near Winchester: the barley and wheat. John, her husband, explained to me that the planter that sowed the crops last spring had a computer programme that precisely recorded the undulation of the fields and pattern of planting, so that the combine harvester working at the moment will be equipped to reap and sort the crops with utmost precision.

The dust that is generated by harvesting is phenomenal in these dry conditions, making the fields look like the Sahara Desert and not the normal green, lush fields of Britain. It reminds me of my heritage, with all my grandmother’s generation, on my mother’s side, deriving their livelihood from farms in the grasslands of NSW just before the Outback. In the summer, it was a sunburnt country.

 

Like in Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country:

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.

We had a BBQ in the Cotswolds on Friday night with the Barbers and other families. In that  last August in Norfolk, on holiday with the Barbers in August 2001, the weather was unseasonably warm. Geoff even managed to get his shirt off, and the children played in streams formed by the outgoing tide. We had lots of barbies on the beach.

There is nothing like the smell of meat being cooked over charcoal, rather than on the stove or oven grill. Stan the Man, my father, was an expert barbecuer. He had a mammoth barbie in every home we lived in, dwarfing the rest of the backyard with its presence, like a shrine. He even kept a roving barbie in the boot of his station wagon, and he would russle up grub for hungry grandchildren after a long day at the beach. He was a barbie legend.

Last Friday in the Cotswolds, before the barbie got going at 6pm, we had a cream tea by a navy and white cricket pavilion. After an afternoon of tennis and games. Nothing like an English summer’s arvo, with tea and scones. And the civilised chatter of pheasants and stags, convivial and pleasant. Many of the young ones were embarking soon on gap years abroad before starting Uni next October. They are anxiously waiting for A-level results this week to determine their Uni places. I am glad those days are behind us.

Geoff had a gap year with his mate Paul. They went everywhere, but for a time he worked in a hotel kitchen in Interlaken, Switzerland. For his 50th birthday, we went skiing and then headed to that very same hotel for old time’s sake. And to see if the drawer where he hid a chicken kiev, to his peril, still existed.

Today, I have to hit the garden and catch up with jobs at the Old Rectory.