Sunday night is... Ella's Summertime

The picture fuzzy, the voice as clear and pure as ever.

It has been a summer to remember but not for the weather. Even now, as we are heading for Peter Scupham's for the launch of his new book, Borrowed Landscapes, and John Mole's new The Point of Loss, at a poetry picnic - I am to take my accordion, which I do with fear and trembling, and a poem - the weather is the same thin grey we have had most of the season, one that looks on the edge of sunlight and might even, for a few minutes at a time, actually produce it. The clouds are delicately piled: there is no malice in them, only a kind of hesitancy. It is calm weather, if something as faint and tremulous looking as the sky outside my window just now can be described as calm.

It reminds me a little of the two women - mother and daughter - who lived above us in our Leeds flat in our last year there. Both were depressive, both nervous. We had, by miracle, a piano but I had to creep upstairs and ask them every time if it was all right to play it. That depended on how close they were to another ECT appointment. They would sit there, quite still and smile, but the hands of the daughter were always on the edge of trembling. Thus the sky. One should creep up there and ask it in a quiet voice if it's OK to play the accordion below.