Summer Has Come From The Sunny Land ... Finally!

This week has been so different from the run of previous ones where Summer seemed to have decided to have popped along to the UK early for a week at the end of March and then disappeared again for good. It has been Hot And Sunny pretty much all week and it's been delicious! I've spent as much time outside as I can. One of the huge advantages of working from home is that even work doesn't have to stop play if you see what I mean. Not all work can be done out in the garden but quite a lot can so it has been! And I have so needed to feel the sun on my skin making vitamin D like there's no tomorrow and engendering that sense of bien être that comes from spending hours outside. I know all the risks about not using high factor sunscreen and the perils of acquiring a face that looks like a wrinkly old walnut but after such a long time deprived of sun there has just been something so therapeutic about being able to bask in a bit of it. Basking is not perhaps quite the right word as it's been quite a busy week but you get the gist and even among the busy bits there have been some basking moments.

Here are a few of them that seem to me to have captured that new arrival of Summer from wherever it has been hiding in that far-off Sunny Land of the childhood song that gave me the name for my new (and nearly finished) blanket:

Ice and sliced lemon in tall glasses of fizzy mineral water (lots of these this week)

The first Spanish cherries of the season in a blue bowl in the evening sun

Watering my aromatic Moroccan mint in the greenhouse where it prefers to reside but where the heat this week has been a bit much even for it

Surveying the beginnings of my annual "basil forest" emerging fast also in the greenhouse, despite only being planted a week ago because I didn't feel like it when it was so cold and wet and I don't think the seeds would have felt like it much either

Blueberry muffins in summer dresses of pink stripy tulip papers

Breathing the heady scent of the wisteria flowers hanging like sweet, perfumed bunches of grapes outside my study so that even at those times when I have had to work inside, the scent of Summer has still wafted through the open window

Crocheting together the completed squares of my Summer Has Come From The Sunny Land blanket outside in the sun - how could I not this week?! It's not quite all assembled yet but nearly so. I think it will need a border - something nice and scallopy so finding a suitable pattern is next on my little list of hooky to-dos!

Amazingly it's the weekend and the sun is still here! 

Hopefully with you too wherever you are - enjoy it while it lasts 

because, if you are in the UK at any rate, it may vanish without trace! 

Happy Sunny Weekend Everyone!