15 Shooting the breeze

There are many kinds of silence. There's the embarrassed silence you get at breakfast in a seaside boarding house, which makes the tinkling of tea-cups seem deafening by comparison. There's the blissful silence when a migraine-inducing car alarm finally drains the battery and whines to a halt. There's the brooding silence at the heart of a marriage when love has died. But best of all are those moments when the chatter of the mind abates, when memories, ambitions and everyday worries evaporate like puddles on a hot pavement, and - however briefly - you are blessed with stillness.

There are a few precious days every year when the leaves on the trees glow with an almost hypnotic shade of green, as though lit from within. When the swallows, swifts and martins race and scream above the village, seemingly for the sheer joy of scything effortlessly through the air. When the more irritating members of the insect world have yet to muster in numbers. When almost anything seems possible. And today, is one of them. The world seems to have been washed clean by overnight rain; now the sun is shining out of a cloudless and untroubled sky. It's perfect. A buzzard flies overhead - two beats and a glide – before finding a thermal and getting into a holding pattern. It soars high over the patchwork of fields in a lazy spiral, up and up and up, until, no more than a speck, it disappears into the clouds.

There's no better time of the year to skive, loaf, dawdle, dally, hang loose, take things easy, stand and stare, shoot the breeze, twiddle our thumbs, kick our heels, and generally let the grass grow under our feet. Here in Whimsey we have learned to enjoy the lexicon of leisure. We have time to relax and ponder some of life’s knottier questions. Like “Have Wagon Wheels got smaller, or is it just that we’ve got bigger?” “Why is there a 'best by' date on sour cream?” “Why don't film censors get depraved and corrupt?” And that hardy perennial: “Why are we here... instead of, say, over there?” With some questions resisting a simple answer, we may have to admit, if pressed, that we still don’t know the way to San José…