Time on the Tilt
August 24, 2026Reading time: 5 minutes
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Although it is still August and the sun is hot, the nights are cold and the dew is heavy on the grass. Rowan berries ripening is more of an early warning signal, but when you notice the colour on the reships and hawthorns, it's time to pick up a gear. The grasses, docks and willow herbs are seeding into the hedgerows, there are ripe brambles on the banks and the Himalayan balsam is lining the burn side. The garden smells of ripening damsons after the rain, and there are feathers in the grass where adult birds are moulting and putting on winter plumage. I hear owls again in the darker nights, and the herb patch is rippling with bees and hoverflies. Today the last buddleia flowers are full of painted ladies, and we have had enormous numbers of peacocks, tortoiseshells, red admirals and the usual white butterflies. But also, for the first time, I've seen speckled wood, small copper, and commas here.The hot summer hasn't done any of us much good, and we'll count the cost later, but the butterflies have had a wonderful season.
We have been blest with the wild edges through the year, from the cowslips and cuckoo flower, the blossoming trees and the glorious stands of vetch and clover and thistles. It has made me so happy to see this, but I am aware that Scotland has escaped the worst of the drought, and we are very lucky not to have dealt with scorched gardens, hosepipe bans, lost crops and the rest of it. There are people my age who draw parallels with 1976, as if this was nothing to make a fuss about, but selective memory is a wonderful thing. We had to deal with wartime bath levels of five inches, there were bowsers delivering water to some badly hit areas, and the potato crop was so badly hit that the price of a bag of chips nearly doubled. There was, for a while, a shortage of flour and sugar, and a rumour that salt was going to be next so that panic buying broke out. Then there was the country-wide problem of houses subsiding because of the ground drying out, so that even when your house wasn't affected, the accusation of subsidence was enough to make your house unmortgageable. We were trying to buy our first house just after this, and the Edinburgh housing market didn't know what had hit it. The winter of discontent followed fairly soon after, and it wasn't entirely unconnected.
I can feel that we are in for some of the same sort of instability now. Even Reform feel they have to promise some sort of water conservation response, so it must be serious (not that I would expect them to actually do anything useful!). If forecasters are right and we are in for a massive El Niño event, we really need to have measures in place to keep the water in the ground, and flowing into the reservoirs, not just washing out into the sewers. In my garden, I'm looking at adding humus to the soil in the garden, which will improve drainage, and also add texture and help to retain water, and we're adding rain storage to the gutters where we can. At the moment it's just a couple of buckets! I want to improve my planting to make sure that as much of our soil is covered as possible, too. And we have just installed solar panels. I can't quite believe they will do as well as the salesman assured us, but if it serves as a warning to politicians that we are serious enough about dealing with the climate to put our money where our mouths are, it will help.
On a wider scale, I know there are many people rewetting bogs, re-wiggling water-courses, and bringing back beavers who seem to be doing more to stabilise water levels than anything else. Solar panels are cheaper than they have ever been (but that is a relative concept, I know!) and world wide there is a boom in their production and supply. And yet, there are politicians who are still presenting the environment as a niche issue they can play off against the more urgent needs of income and employment, and energy companies who can say on the one hand that people need help to pay their energy bills, while milking the current political crisis to keep their prices sky high. Time is tilting towards winter, but our time is tilting too, towards the moment when we must put up or shut up, when we realise that looking after each other means looking after the earth that sustains us.
There are so many needs going unmet, but there are also so many people doing something about it. If you follow me on Instagram you will find a lot of them, and their work sustains me in mine. If you are feeding birds, leaving a wild corner in your garden, saving a community centre, supporting someone who is facing war or discrimination, keeping a language or a culture alive, protecting an endangered species, or caring for someone dealing with grief or deprivation, your workman't be over-valued. You are keeping us all from tilting into the abyss.
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