1) The knowledge that the reservoirs have been re-stocked and the ground is rich and moist makes me feel safe and replete.

2) In the fleeting moments when the sun DOES shine, the grass is all the more verdant, the colours deliciously intense.

3) I can’t run at the moment because – seven months on – I’m still recovering from an injury.  The rain makes this a tiny bit less frustrating.

4) Due to that same running injury, there is only one pair of shoes I can wear at this point in time – and those shoes require socks. I’m glad it’s chilly.

5) I had vowed to make progress in my garden this summer but – as ever – haven’t had time. I feel all this rain kinda lets me off that one.

6) Sports Day was cancelled.

7) I am at a stage in life when I feel sad and full of grief.  The rain has made me feel that the world is weeping with me.

Image on blog menu page @Skippy3E

Don’t get me wrong, I love summer evenings – sitting with friends as the barbeque cools and the scents of the impending darkness fill the air, calling the children in from the far ends of the camp site as it approaches ten o’clock, coming home all nice ‘n’ lazy because it’s light and it will stay that way for – oooh – hours and hours. I luxuriate in the ease of summer.

But there’s another side (should I say a shadow side?) to the gloriously long evenings of June.

Why I feel relief at the summer solstice

What about the times when I’m tired or sad and all I want is to get home, have a bath and get into my pyjamas?  It’s just not the same doing that in daylight.

What about the moments when I long to create a womb-like space in which to curl up, light a candle and pray?  I need to do that all the year round but in summer there is often a dissonance between the callings of my inner world and the long, glaring hours of light.

I’m not complaining. One of the many things I enjoy about living in England is its climate and the contrast between its winter nights and summer days.

But as the year is poised on this, the summer solstice, I salute and welcome the start of the hemisphere’s descent into darkness,  just as, in six months’ time, I will welcome its ascent into light.

(I also had an ankle injury and had to take my child out of nursery but that’s not the point of this post. The point is to find a way of smiling like a Buddhist cat amidst that particular frustration that could not have existed before the internet was invented.)

This is what I said to myself:

1) Don’t take it personally

Some of us (mainly women?) see a techy failure as evidence that we are stupid cows, which is the biggest block to finding a solution that there is. You are not stupid. You are a smart person trying to figure it out. That’s all.

2) Take baby steps

We could spend the rest of our lives learning about computers, servers, hosts, SEO, POP3 and HTML code and we still wouldn’t know everything there is to know. Feeling overwhelmed is another block in learning. Don’t try to learn everything or even a lot. Take baby steps. Take one a day. You’ll be canny before you know it.

3) Remember you are not alone

Mentally identify the people who can help you. There are probably more than you think. Share yourself between them, so you aren’t asking the same person all the time. It often helps to type your question into Google and see what comes up  – though you don’t want to know that when NOT BEING ABLE TO GET ON THE NET IS WHAT YOU DARN WELL CAN’T DO IN THE FIRST PLACE.

4) See this as an opportunity to learn

When something gets sorted out, make sure you understand what went wrong. Then you can congratulate yourself on having taken five baby steps before you even got to the end of the week.

5) Question why we expect it to be effort-free

If we see a beautiful garden, we appreciate people have spent years on their knees, breaking their backs and washing the soil from their fingernails. If folks are using technology in a nifty way, we just assume they’re clever geeks rather than imagine the thought, the times they were foxed and the hours spent watching little green bars move across a computer screen.

6) Enjoy the change of rhythm

There comes a point, when you are ill, when you have to abandon your plans for the day and accept you can’t do anything so you may as well enjoy spending time with your duvet. View technological failures in the same way. Accept you as can’t be as productive as you had planned so find something else to enjoy in the hiatus.

And with that wise advice to myself I wafted through my week on a jasmine-scented cloud….. That woman who lost it while on the phone to Virgin Media. It wasn’t me. Oh no.