A little bit of self-promotion

I've just joined The Independent Author Network. You can see my page at http://t.co/a6S3T87xC3 It would seem that in order to succeed as an author, you have to spend more time trawling the internet for new ways to flag the interest of new readers than you do writing. There are any number of platforms out there that I have yet to get to grips with; Tumblr,  Pinterest, Stumbleupon, etc. I see that Reddit has survived from quite a way back, but I'm sure that there used to be a load of other services like it that have gone the way of the dodo. Ah well, it is a fast changing world online. Anyone been on Friends Reunited recently?

Hal-an-Tol!

Hal an tol, jolly rumble-oh!

We've been up long before the day-oh!

To welcome in the summer

To welcome in the May-oh!

For summer is icumen in

And winter's gone away-oh!

Here we stand, as the sun rises on the month of May. The BBC is probably poised to launch its Springwatch programme on us yet again. Yet there we have one of our oldest folk songs telling us that we are welcoming in the summer, for it is but six and a half weeks to midsummer. I know that I have technically jumped the gun on the actual date of the ancient festival of May Day (also known as Beltane (Irish) or Calen Haf (Welsh)) by a few days, but the words of the song clearly speak of welcoming in the May, so I have timed this post to go out at sunrise in Newcastle upon Tyne on the 1st of May.

Will I have been up long before the day? Probably, probably not! Let's just hope that it feels like the beginning of summer.

Why am I so fascinated by all of this? It is a reaction to something that always annoys me in desk diaries, which tell me that summer begins on the 21st June, which is patently nonsense. More importantly, when I am writing of times which did not have this sort false view of the seasons, if I talk about "the beginning of summer" I need it to be clear that I am talking about early May, not late June.