{ Summer’s End }

Hello! How are you all? I was so delighted to read all your comments on my last post: glad to see you have not deserted me! Summer is almost over here, if it ever started. I love every season: spring for the hyacinths and bluebells and newborn lambs it brings, summer for the long hours of golden sunshine and the happy carefree feeling that comes with it, autumn with its crunchy red and crimson leaves is beautiful and I love the feeling of starting up at school again …. a fresh start. And winter - my favourite – for its snows and frosts and beautiful barren trees, and for that Christmas feeling that is like nothing else in the entire world!

 This summer has been an odd one here in England, with floods galore and politicians calling for aid for those affected, and ministers labelling my generation as the epitome of moral breakdown – especially with the shooting of beautiful little Rhys Jones last week. My heart just aches for his dear family. Yet this summer was a sacred one. This summer was the summer we have waited for for our whole lives – the summer after GCSEs, after those huge looming exams, when we would have nothing to do but laze in the sun and get up around noon. Now that always sounded terribly boring to me; I am a morning person through and through, I always feel as if I am missing out on life if I sleep too late! So it’s been a busy summer, with day trips here and there, and visiting museums and galleries all alone by myself whilst my friends sleep until 44 minutes past noon, and visits to the ocean and our wonderful trip to Canada.  38 books, 73 newspapers, thousands of images later: here I am. School starts on Monday and I could not be happier. Much as I love holidays, August makes me restless. There is not much news for all the important people are on holiday, the weather is too hot or too rainy for much and parliament is not in session so no interesting laws are being passed. I cannot wait to be in Year 12 – to be learning again, making new friends, meeting new teachers and walking through those halls again where my heart is at its most content. Yet as much as I want to go back, I have loved this summer.

It has been a rather lonely summer. My mother and father work full-time, and blessed are we that they do, for they work so hard to send us to the school that they do and provide for my sister and I. I am incredibly lucky in our world today. My sister spent two weeks in Scotland, nine hours away, with a friend and I was left to my own devices for those 15 days. I picked blackberries in our garden, sat in the orchard and read for days, I wrote poetry, and started up on my novel again, and I took countless pictures. I would sometimes take the tube to the end of the line, just to see places I hadn’t been before. It felt so incredibly independent. The girls at my school I saw sometimes, but not too often, and I was happy to do my own thing. I like being by myself. I always have, although I savour company as much.

So this image really represents my summer – just my flip-flops, me by myself and alone, yet happy (hmm does that gorgeous F/1.4 bokeh signify happiness? *sigh*). I love it, taken with my new 50mm F/1.4 lens that is divinity itself!

Thanks for reading my ramblings. :P It makes me so happy :) sad as that may be! Have a fab evening (and rest of summer), love Miss L.