Country Life BY IAN NIALL WE arc having summer weather
at the moment and with a vengeance, although how long it will last no one knows. As I write, the scent of newly cut grass is in the air and the swifts are high. Almost a week summer has lasted and no one has said a word about the atomic bomb being the cause. We have complained of midges. red spiders, big bluebottles, evening invasions of moths and crane flies, while on the road the movement of swarming ants sent someone hurrying for.a kettle of boiling water. The wonderful thing about hot weather is the way that animals and insects react and plant life thrives. Superabundance is the right word for high summer. The weather never suits everyone. The very people who were complain- ing a-month ago arc saying that the heat saps the strength, but the really satisfied people are the haymakers clattering away to make those neat cubes or bricks of grass all over the shorn fields. 'Lovely weather.' say the weary ones, 'if you have nothing to do.' An old man I met on the way down from one of the.farms mopped his brow and remarked that this is an old- fashioned summer. They were all like this in his youth—all on the strength of seven hot days.
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