Thursday, June 27

I got up even earlier than usual to make up for losing time yesterday. There were a couple of long rumbles of thunder in the distance but nothing came of them.

Yesterday I had decided that my writing strategy was not working. I was throwing away as much as I was writing. Rearranging the pieces of the previous draft into a more cohesive new draft was proving impossible using text editors. In the night I remembered Scrivener, which I looked at last summer and put to one side.

This morning I found that I still had it installed and the thirty day trial was still valid. I spent an hour running through the tutorial, and then I began. It was very cloudy and the girls were in the field so I worked until noon. By that time I was completely reinvigorated. Scrivener really made it very easy to do what I needed to do, and now I understood it it was already beginning to seem indispensible.

In the afternoon there was a sudden downpour of torrential rain that lasted about two hours. Farming work was abandoned for the day.

Now it has stopped, the sea is obscured by mist, and I have stopped writing. I have walked down to the road and over into the trees. For a few moments the sun comes out in a cinematic way.

Later the girls will scrub some of Camilla’s potatoes and we will have them with pepperoni flavoured sausages.

The sky will darken and we will all go to bed much earlier than usual. Last night I slept under a thin sheet. Tonight I will have to get the duvet out again.