Oh, to be in England now that

Summer's here. It's twenty-seven degrees in Oxford, I am wearing my favourite light-as-air skirt and my favourite little top, there are no clouds in the sky. shimgray and I went for a lovely walk down by the Isis, and stopped in a picturesque pub just before Iffley Lock and drank cider, and lemonade with ginger, and watched the pleasure craft and geese pass by on the river. It's days like this when I wonder how I can even begin to be considering leaving this city, where I have been so happy, and where the world drifts to the water in May.

(But Ithaca has Cayuga Lake, and Cambridge, the Cam - so we shall see.)

The forecast is set to stay good, and I have been contemplatively looking at sundresses on eBay. It is worth noting, before I am mocked by Americans and other aliens, that summer in England is not an annual event; that our enjoyment of every hot summer day is plagued with fear that it will be the last beautiful day, not merely of the season but of one's life, and so shedding clothes and grabbing at picnic baskets is the only reasonable response.

So there has been capering in the sun today, and now it's evening and still bright and the air has a half-baked quality, as though it's been trapped within the walls all day; which, I suppose, it has - my benchmark for heat is India, and while India is a great deal hotter (forty-seven degrees, today!), the buildings are made so heat reflects briefly in and then firmly out, and there are ceiling fans, and air-conditioning units, and occasionally fridges that I wish to live in. (And power cuts. Fridges stay cool a surprisingly long time even after the power has failed.) But in India you don't get quite this much airlessness, because the heat here is being held in by double-glazing and beds with thick covers.

But I still love it. Forty-seven degrees makes me into the proverbial wilting flower, but heat like this, gentle, with appreciative breezes, with brand new red sandals and brand new red toenail polish, with that kind of deep ease in it, it's lightening. It makes me feel very comfortable in skin. And speaking of India. In July 2007, I went on yatra (pilgrimage, sort of) to Vaishno Devi, which is some distance from Jammu, and it was an experience. At the actual point of pilgrimage, at Bhawan, there were crowds and crowds of people and we were hustled quickly through - it was the peak season - and my mother has said, ever since, that she missed it. I've tried to argue that it was about the journey - the 15 km up and then down again - and not so much the destination, which she does concede to some extent, but I think she feels that the moment passed her by. And put that way I understand it; doing a yatra isn't procedural, it is about faith, and you can't speak for someone else about that. If she feels she missed it, she missed it.

So we're planning to do it again. This time, though, a lot of things will be different. A smaller party - we numbered in the low millions last time - and in December, rather than the baking heat and monsoon, we'll have snow. And also, shimgray is coming with us, which my mother suggested; which for me brings a quiet measure of a calm, a quiet reassurance that things are ticking over as they ought. (I've never known if my parents think my relationship is not a problem, or not a problem yet; it's a mystery to them as well, I suspect. Don't I blaze trails, on my quiet way through life.) And I am looking forward to this so, so much - this is supposed to be a year of change, a year balanced on the cusp of newness - and that it ends in a place I've been before, in a new skin, is something that feels right to me.