The summer now standing in platform One

is the delayed 2007. I think this is the first week where there has been no rain at all, and no winds that threatened to put me off the ladder or swirl the hedge clippings and uprooted weeds around to double the mess I had created.

I have just driven my youngest brother to the station on the start of his trip to India. We celebrated his birthday last night in an Indian restaurant near to where mother lives. It seems, looking back now, a strange choice of meal, unless it was a piece of subtle preparation for his stomach. I slipped back into my old habits, eating too much, drinking too deeply, quipping too quickly with another brother with whom I have had occasional spats. I shall be uprooting these habits soon, just like the weeds and brambles I have been pulling out. I don't need them anymore, they're in the wrong places in my head, overshadowing and occluding other parts of me that need a chance to see the light again.

I drove back from the station in his Discovery, feeling too large and bloated in the little country lanes, just as I felt too large and bloated behind the wheel with my belly still full of Bangladeshi cuisine. I don't like to feel large and ponderous, and although I can appreciate the higher seating position that allows you to occasionally see over the tops of the hedges into the fields beyond, I felt intimidated by the extra width of the car as I went down the little lanes that I would happily squeeze my own car through. Fortunately I met nothing coming the other way, and swapped cars to complete my journey home in something smaller and less significant.

The tractors were out in the lanes, scurrying between fields and farms as they try to catch up on the delayed harvest. Already there are rumours of poor crops. Our own potatoes on the platform succumbed to blight, and in a farmhouse garden that I have been working on, their crop also went yellow and withered, so I know it was not the potatoes I planted or the soil we used. The fact that it wasn't any failing on my part doesn't really make me feel any better, though.

The uneasy feeling I have sensed is building slowly, as I read of world money-markets sliding down on fears that the American sub-prime mortgage business is shaky. So, we're all doomed to suffer because a group of businesses who like to lend money to a group of people who have a history of being unable to pay their debts are suddenly worried that they might have risked a little too much? Just like we're all doomed to pay increased house insurance premiums because people who have chosen to live in houses in areas at risk of flooding have started claiming when the floods actually occurred. The laboratories that supposedly work to protect us from disease and pestilence suddenly crop up as the very sources of the troubles. How much more absurd can this world become?

I dodged around the tractors and reached the roundabout at the top of the hill, to see over a mile of cars tailed back. Fortunately they were going in the opposite direction to my way home, as they all plodded slowly along in each other's wake on their way to the coast. The filling-stations have been expecting them, and the fuel prices show this. We, in the countryside, pay 3 to 4 pence a litre more for our fuel than those who live in the cities 30 to 50 miles away. The fuel companies know they do not have to compete with each other for custom, and also have a captive customer-base. If you live in the countryside, you must have fuel to get around, there are few buses, and the trains are mostly for London-bound commuters or people like my brother, heading up to Heathrow for a jet to carry him halfway round the world. The queue of people for the ticket office had been longer than the booking hall could hold when we arrived at the station, and when the train pulled in they had to jump on board and get ready to pay on the train, without the discount deals available through the computer system in the tiny office manned by a single member of staff. There isn't provision in the station for increasing staff levels at busy times, because that would mean increased wage costs, something that is anathema to our modern world. Let the costs of living nd taxation burdens rise as they like, but do not on any account encourage people to take the obvious method of finding the extra money they themselves need to play their part in the process.

My feeling of unease is growing daily, as I look at the costs of driving around, the costs of running electrical appliances, the looming threat of a cold winter requiring lots more heating, and the hint that we, as customers, will have to pay for the upgrading of the old water systems around the country to cope with the new threats of annual flooding. It might be better to relocate half of Gloucestershire to Scotlsnd and turn the county into rice-paddies, surely?

"Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air..."

My sense of lurking menace is due to the wonderful weather after the unexpected appearance of Autumn after Spring, the sense that this is a misplaced summer that might be the last one we see for a while, as storm clouds gather below the horizon, and not just climactic ones; Russia is flying bombers to taunt US airforce bases in the Pacific, Canada is thinking about trying to compete with Russia for ownership of the Artic area, and the money-markets that thrive on the supply of fuel, food and finance are starting to shake with fear. Is there a depression on the way? Will John Dillinger rise again from the ashes of the last century to taunt the banks once more?

"Lie down on the floor and keep calm." What made public enemy number one decide to quote Heraclitus as he went about redistributing wealth?

I hope that my youngest brother has safe journeys there and back, and finds in his five weeks enough happiness to make up for the loss he suffered earlier this year. I, at least, have finally found some sort of peace in the overgrown and neglected gardens close by, and the hint of a new life.

New dreams for old.