dolorosa_12 | Late summer in the tomato farm

Long weekends in the UK can go two ways: freezing, rainy and miserable, or sun-drenched to perfection. This time around, we got the latter, and everyone seemed to be in a great mood, spilling outside to make the best of the last gasp of summer. Matthias and I were no different: we went to Norfolk, we went to Suffolk, we sat under the trees in our favourite courtyard bar in Ely, and life was good.

Ever since we moved to Ely five years ago, I kept suggesting that we go on a day trip to Kings Lynn (at the far northern end of the train line on which we sit; the southern end is London), and every long weekend when we had a spare day, it would end up pouring with rain and we'd elect to stay home. This time, however, the weather did what we wanted, and we took the train half an hour north, for day of pottering around. We ate a lot of seafood, we discovered a fabulous gin distillery and bar, a fabulous rum bar, and a pretty decent gastropub, we wandered through the historic city centre, and realised far too late that there was also a pretty little walkway along the riverfront, with a foot ferry — something for a future trip, perhaps.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, we caught the train half an hour in the other direction to Bury St Edmund's, which was holding a beer festival in its massive cathedral grounds. (It felt somewhat medieval, especially with all the church officials wandering around in ecclesiastical dress, as if we'd stepped back in time before the Reformation, as guests of a beer-brewing monastery.) We stayed for about five hours, people watching and chatting, before returning to Ely in the early evening. Miraculously, everything worked flawlessly with the trains for both day trips, which is not always a given!

My preference on long weekends is to do the travel on the earlier days, staying progressively closer and closer to home each day, so today we did just that — I haven't gone further than the swimming pool, although we did have lunch at the market, before wandering home, eating gelato. This afternoon will involve the usual weekend wind-down activities: yoga, cooking, a bit of catching up on Dreamwidth.

One thing I did not do at all was any reading, although I did finish two books earlier in the week: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk), and There Are Rivers in the Sky (Elif Shafak). The former I'd been meaning to read for ages — an uncompromising, almost folkloric tale set in a small Polish village in which a prickly older woman opposes the illegal hunting and poaching of her neighbours (which appears to be ubiquitous and tolerated by the authorities; there are multiple almost comedic instances in which she shows up at the local police station and council to get them to do something about the matter, to no avail) and sets herself at odds with everyone. It's very much a story about the limits of the law, the difference between law and justice, and what happens when individuals in small communities decide to refuse to continue all the instances of polite uncomfortable tolerance that maintain social cohesion and harmony, and I'm glad I read it at last. There Are Rivers in the Sky is probably going to be my last try with Shafak, who has interesting ideas but executes them in a way that doesn't quite work for me. This novel, like the others of hers I've read, has multiple strands across space and time — an impoverished boy growing up in Victorian London whose intelligence and interest in antiquities leads to a meteoric rags-to-riches rise (with suitably Dickensian flourishes, including a cameo by the man himself), an Arab-British woman who moves into a houseboat in the wake of the collapse of her marriage, and reassesses her life, including her all-important relationships with the aunt and uncle who raised her, and a young Yadizi girl who travels with her beloved grandmother to Iraq and ends up captured by ISIS militants. Woven through all these stories are bodies of water, particularly the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the millennia of lives they've witnessed. It's an interesting weave of stories, competently told, but undermined by Shafak's tendency to sentimentality (how you make the story of a nine-year-old Yadizi girl captured and enslaved by ISIS sentimental is beyond me, but Shafak gives it a good try), and the flatness of the characters.

It still feels like summer here, but if I look closely, there are changes: some of the cherry trees' leaves are yellow, the lavender plants in the front garden are all dried out, the feel of the air is slightly different. My nod to the slide towards autumn is to start bottling some of the summer abundance — fridge pickles, three litres of fermented tomatoes. I picked some of the dahlias and marigolds and put them in the living room. Our front windowsill has a line of pears and giant tomatoes in varying stages (and hues) of ripeness. If nothing else, the colours of summer are alive and vivid in my house, even as time marches on.