And so, at last, we have arrived at May. For me, it is a toss-up between May and June as to which is the best month to be on these British Isles.
June wins on days’ length and that languidly happy feeling of summer stretching itself out to warm bones. But May offers budding promise and fresh greenness. It is a time of bounty asparagus, strawberries and the first truly warm days.
They always seem a kind of miracle, those first days of heat and cloudless sky. On one, we meet the irrepressible Pop Larkin and his brood in H.E. Bates’s The Darling Buds Of May.