August and Everything After

August has disappeared.

In these strange and often frustrating times, it’s been fun and busy and refreshing, and has disappeared in a flash. Likewise, summer now seems to be following hot on its heels, with pessimists crawling out of the woodwork to decry “Schools have gone back!” and therefore “Summer is over!”

I refuse to be drawn in by these naysayers; far from 2020 being the summer that never was, summer is far from done yet, with much left still to salvage. I still have more weekends away on Calstar to look forward to, hopefully a couple of weeks away sailing in Greece planned for the end of October, karate will hopefully restart next week or soon after, and a week on Saturday I have a gig booked in a pub garden, the first since Friday 13^th March, and possibly the last of 2020, but a gig nonetheless. I only hope it doesn’t rain.

Oh, and the open mic nights are restarting at the Old Restoration again over in Cheltenham. Not quite the same as a gig exactly, but a distraction until the gigs return in full. The band’s diary for next year is rapidly filling, although why next year should be any different to the latter half of this one, I’m not so sure. We can but live in hope, I suppose.

In the meantime, I currently find myself feeling a bit like an errant school boy that’s let his overdue homework pile up too high to in any way seem assailable. Across two weeks away sailing at the beginning of August, and a long weekend sailing at the end, it appears I took 1185 photographs and sailed just shy of 271 nautical miles up and down the south coast between Brixham in South Devon and the Helford in Cornwall. And in between the trips away with Calstar of course, there was the usual chasing around the cans on the lake at South Cerney.

I feel like I owe myself some sort of accounting for the month, but it’s quite difficult to know where to begin. Perhaps not by simply posting all 1185 photographs, not least because, as is the way with these things, a lot of them are a bit rubbish and most of them very repetitive. But I think there are a few gems amongst them that I might try to pick out.

Meanwhile, hello September. And no, summer’s definitely not over yet.