longest day

I get definite pagan feelings at the solstices - long to be out there at dawn watching for sunrise at stonehenge, or lighting a fire in midwinter to last the night through and make sure the sun returns. Usually of course I'm too busy to organise anything of the sort but the feelings are there.
At uni we used to have a beach party on this Saturday, combining end of term frolics with solstice celebration. There was a place called simply the cottage, right down on the Lune estuary, owned by a christian family in Lancaster who rented it out to students through the CU. It was a strange magical place, windswept, exposed, lacking in all kinds of basic facilities and almost impossible to get to, yet there was never a shortage of takers. The summer parties were officially fancy dress though not everyone dressed up. Four of us girls dressed up as vestal virgins one year and drove through Lancaster in Chris' ancient Anglia getting some very funny looks.
But what I liked best was simply staying up. Watching the fire burn down slowly, the tide creeping up over the mudflats, the sky slowly darkening to that deep midsummer northern blue, never totally dark. How I loved the incredible long evenings, still light at nearly 11 and the sun up again before three. It was part of the whole experience to sit the night through after the party, either on the beach or back on campus over drinks or best of all to get in the car and head for Clougha Pike to watch the sunrise. We watched the sun go down and the faint half circle of twilight moving slowly east, never quite fading till it brightened again.
I can't believe it's thirty years since we all met on the beach, for most of us it was the last time we were all together. Solstice comes round after solstice, June, December, June, December more quickly than ever. In HG Wells the Time machine, the traveller sees the years eventually flashing like days into a blur as he speeds up. Our days pass faster than a weavers shuttle the bible says, scarcely even a breath of the turning earth.