Summer used to be about watermelon and aubergines; blazing hot days; soft, warm nights that stretched on for ever; crickets that were the soundtrack flickering stars; praying for rain; the sea and the sand.

Now it is about blueberries and broad beans; changeable weather; always carrying a cardigan; evenings that linger on for ever; praying for sun; the green hills and the river.

Welcome, anyway.

It might sound like it, but I don’t really regret this turn of events, the end of those young and silly years, at least most of the time I don’t. I wonder –oh, how I wonder– about the magic and where it went, not that I have lost it altogether, far from it, it’s just that it is not as ever-present as it once was; but in a way I am glad to have seen the back of those years. They were magical, yes, but they were dark too. The uncertainty, the not knowing, the doubt, those countless nights when I couldn’t sleep, could hardly breathe with the anxiety of it all: was I losing my way or finding it? What did I have to do leave a sweet mark on the world? Would my life ever amount to anything? Would I? Would I?

They were a triumph of optimism over experience, those years, of magic over darkness — much like my childhood, which is what had come before, and the bang-and-a-crash years that followed. I have always been in love with the world and yet entirely unsure as to whether it deserved it; or rather, whether it was going to break my heart. And it did, it often did. It still does, for that matter. But at least now I know I’m on my way, my life does amount to something and so do I.

Just in case the title reminds you of something but you can’t for the life of you remember what: take a look here.

And then I went quiet again.

I’ve said it before, and it sounds so very weak, but I always think of saying it again, of swearing: I think of writing mostly every day. It is the habit of doing it that I have lost, and my voice along with that. Once upon a time, oh so long ago now, I wrote frequently and, miracle of miracles, fluidly at times too; largely about indiepop, it’s true, but also about being in love with the world, and about growing up. This was, and in fact it still is since I never got round to changing it, this blog’s tagline: growing up, being in love with the world, and indiepop. And the strangest thing is that what started out as something I hastily filled in in the summer of 2005 while setting this blog up ended up being the perfect summary of everything I was to write about.

So there once was a time, oh so long ago now, when I was young and silly and I had a head full of dreams and I opened up my heart to the whole world. The days when trying to capture thoughts and feelings into words seemed like a most worthwhile, almost magical thing to do — when words made things happen. Mostly, they brought me together with people that were more like me than anybody I had met before. For a few years I made friends left right and centre with an ease that was as novel as it turned out to be short lived, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It was okay to be me, it was okay to be so very strange and different. But those years ended — with what seemed at the time to be a happily ever after ending but which in retrospect was more of a crash and a bang; people moved on, went their separate ways; indiepop stopped being the number one thing that made my world go round; I lost some of my certainties, gained some new ones; and in the process, I lost the voice that I had found. Or rather, I outgrew it, and never got round to finding a new one.

Hence, the silence.