11pm

Almost midsummer already, and thankfully the sky is clear for once so that we enjoy the long, long twilight.

Or alternatively - dusk, crepuscule, cock-shut, greyness, dusking-tide, gloaming, cock-light, owllight - as the Longman Synonym Dictionary would have it.

The silhouetted trees are very pretty like this (apart from the awful conifer), But they are ash trees, and if I think of all the seedlings that are saplings before I've found them lurking under a shrub I think of them less favourably. And in fact they are the bane of our lives here, as they grow quickly and cast a surprising amount of shade but most of them are in neighbour's garden, and there's nothing we can do about them..