In addition to sending paid Steady subscribers monthly interviews with authors of our Books of the Month, once a quarter, we invite a different writer to share their most favourite and pleasurable moments of the season.

Today, CBTR editor Diva Harris bites down through summer’s shared bounty of ripe fruit, hot red planets and abundant honesty stalls.

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^{Illustration: Adam Higton}

It would be remiss of me to pretend that summer has been easy to enjoy. Nothing makes me feel more deranged than a cheery allusion to the lovely weather, or rosé-tinted instagram post whose caption-writer wishes for a neverending summer, when for weeks, everything has been metaphorically and literally on fire.

As I sit down to write this, in the middle of a national park in the south west of England, three-quarters of the country is officially in drought. Out on the moor, gorse drier than bone, tinder, or anything else that is dry, we watch teenagers mucking about on 2-stroke motorbikes. A bolt of anxiety rockets through me when B says that 2-strokes are notorious for spitting out sparks. The pond at the top of the hill is empty and fissured; its earth smells scorched. The sheep who normally drink from it sit in its cracked bowl, confused. The reliable moorland spring trickles to a stop.

The balance of life is delicate and it swings precariously, delirious in the heat. How am I supposed to derive pleasure from a violently hot summer in which the mushrooms spring from the ground and go over, the blackberries and apples ripen and fall in June and July and August? What will the birds and snails eat in September and October?

All is fraught, but all is not lost.

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