Dog Days

Much to my surprise I find that 'Dog Days' used to appear in the Book of Common Prayer: even good Anglicans in the 16th and early 17th centuries would have taken notice of the movement of the stars and their subtle influence, and so in this extract from the 1552 Book you can see the end of the Dog Days on the Nones of September not long before we see the instruction Sol in Libr. indicating the transition to a new sign of the Zodiac. 

Traditionally the Dog Days, the time when Sirius appears above the eastern horizon just before dawn, are the period when nothing much happens, the depths of summer torpor. I certainly feel that at present, hence there is little enough to say here. I say little happens, but what little there is seems to be an inordinate strain, requiring concentration to keep going at all, which must be a reflection of the times. Even though so much of my normal routines has been closed down by the action of the coronavirus restrictions, other things form an even more iron (and energy-sapping) routine than before. I go down to church every day now, not only to say the Office, but to clean the furniture where people are supposed to sit if they come in to the building, and the door handles and rails. I scrub the toilets on a Saturday because we don't have a cleaner at the moment, and organise, record, and distribute the weekly audio service as well as the physical one, which takes a surprising amount of time. Many of our most active folk have disappeared and all we're doing at the moment is keeping the life of the Church ticking over. But what a lot of effort it seems to take!

Yesterday I found myself being overtaken by a sudden sense of panic and anxiety and realised it was provoked by having too many windows open at once on my laptop as I was transferring information from a variety of documents into two successive new ones. That tells you a lot.