STANDING around at Stonehenge. Smoking too much weed. Bonkers dancing. That’s one way of celebrating the solstice. Linking hands in a ring on a medieval mound in a municipal park and singing circle songs as the cloudy grey dawn lightens is another. All good.

I’ve learnt better ways to do it, though — for myself.

It’s three weeks now since Midsummer, but I’m still enjoying the memories of one of the best and longest I’ve celebrated… so no apologies for this piece, despite its late timing.

I’d been in the habit of thinking of Midsummer as the Eve and the Day of 20th to 21st June, which is the cusp of day lengthening to day shrinking, but actually midsummer day length at its maximum is static over about six days to within just over half a minute.

So Midsummer shouldn’t be a one day holiday, but a six-day holiday… and in Sweden it is by law just that. From June 18-25. So it should be here. If Christmas — in dismal winter — was always 12 days, why shouldn’t Midsummer — at nature’s glorious triumph — be at least six days?

As socialists, of course, we celebrate May Day, which is one of the seasonal days chosen to celebrate the start of proper spring. So is Easter, probably named after an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring (Eostre).

Both are fine times.

But Midsummer is finer, for at that point leaf and plant growth is at its height, like daylight. That cusp time is really worth celebrating.

From that point on we are faced with nature’s inexorable die-back. Grasses and many flowers crisp, yellow and die in the dry heat.

We tend to think that the ancient peoples religiously celebrated the summer solstice, though the evidence from our prehistoric stone circles and tombs is equivocal at best. We tend to think, too, that this custom came from the Celtic peoples. It certainly seems to have survived best with them, but their calendar customs seem to have been focused on the changing of the seasons — Beltane, Lughnasadh, et al — not the solstice. Midsummer shindigs were an importation by Anglo-Saxon and Viking invaders from the north.

That makes abundant sense, for the farther north you go the more extreme is the disparity between summer and winter day length. You can’t ignore it.

All across the northern countries it is Midsummer that is the big festie, and with Christianisation it is June 24, St John the Baptist’s “birthday,” that is the chosen focus. It’s “Midsomer” in Sweden, “Ivan Kupala” (translated as “John the Baptist’s Eve”) in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, “Juhannus” in Finland, “Jonsmessa” in Iceland, “Jaanipaev” in Estonia, “Jani” in Latvia, and “Enyovden” in Bulgaria.

Even in the Catholic south St John’s Day makes it big and takes on the attributes of a solstice celebration, with bonfires. In Portugal it’s the “Festa de San Joao,” and in Spain it’s “Hogueras de San Juan,” celebrated especially in the old Celtic lands of Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria, plus Euzkadi, the Basque country. That festival spread right through Catholic South America, to mix in with voodoo and other traditions.

It’s a time for great blazing bonfires. Look up the gorgeous colourful paintings of Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928) one of Norway’s best known 20th-century painters. All across the green mountainsides, in hamlets, farms and villages, he paints the fells alight with flaming fires and dancing folk.

Great fires, all night dancing and canoodling, leaping into lakes and rivers, dressing up in flower garlands and folk costumes, heaps of special food, and daft stuff like the Frog Dance (an extra-mad conga… only you’re frogs, not a snake!) Midsummer is all sorts of magic.

Yes, magic.

That’s a word that carries a burden for us atheists. But “magic,” in a poetic sense, is what Midsummer is all about. At Midsummer the seals become human and the cows can speak (so they believed in old Iceland). It was a “time of bonfires, processions and divinations,” particularly love divinations for the young and susceptible. It was a time for encounters between humans and fairies, and so Shakespeare made it in a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It is this “liminality”… this in-betweenness  ...this breaking of boundaries between day and night… between the seen and the unseen… the cusp of solar change… that evokes, for me, the use of the word “magic.” 

Could the world continue to get lighter and lighter and darkness disappear? Would that be good? Of course not, but there’s so much emotion and power in that cycle of the turning of the climax of light into the beginning of decay.

And that’s what makes me want to be only in the company of wild nature at Midsummer, because that is the best way to feel embraced by nature’s power. To BE in nature. I don’t want to make love in a crowd. I want to be with the one I love.

As I write this my mind is filled with the scene that surrounded me this Midsummer Eve, standing on a heathy track in a wide forest glade. The pines, birches, oaks and hemlocks were already jet black, with their branches pencilled in tiniest detail. The song thrushes, chiffchaffs and willow warblers were making their music as the clear sky faded down through the blues and mauves and pinks towards its after-sunset orange glow. One after another the birds fell silent. A bat flitted low around me. A sleepless hornet – or was it a dor beetle? — droned around my head before disappearing into bushes. Then a low grunting began and got nearer from the north, as a barrel-chested roding woodcock sculled low across the sky above my head… its Pinocchio beak pointing down and its round wings working in slow motion….“Onk...onk…..onk.” My pal.

It’s not difficult to have these experiences once you know where to go. I was standing only a bit over two miles from the M23 and Crawley… only 30 miles from my old home in Kings Cross… and the Gatwick airliners were flying between me and the sunset.

Over the last decade I’ve got the hang of Midsummer.

On Midsummer Night six years ago I started at 2.30am on my dawn jaunt. Already there were the first streaks of dawn to the north east. As I drove slowly in pitch dark down a narrow lane through deep woods big moths surrounded me and bashed into the windscreen. A “moth snowstorm,” just like 50 years ago. I drove on even slower. Then a polecat appeared (my first ever) caught in the headlights in front of me. I stopped. The polecat did a little dance in front of the car, twirling round and round and jumping… then dodging to the side and away into cover. Big thanks that I’d been so slow. Big thanks to the polecat. When I stopped on the common at 3.35am and opened the car door the air was filled with the churring of African nightjars. I counted perhaps five birds, including two doing their wing clapping thing. As the pink sun came up I was standing on a Bronze Age round barrow surrounded by the soft cooing of doves and the first willow warbler song.

Perhaps my best Midsummer Day was when, with my friend, we walked in the deepest Weald in search of Puck, the old nature spirit that survives in many Sussex place names. Rudyard Kipling and his illustrator Harold Millar’s imagining of Puck is superb, in his children’s book Puck of Pook’s Hill.

We avoided Kipling’s old home at Batemans. The weight of Kipling’s racism and imperialism, and his mangling of English history, lies heavy. Anyway, that was the last place Puck would be.

We wandered along a babbling valley stream and found a group of ancient flower meadows on its slopes. Everything was there, in pixelating colours. Lousewort and heath spotted orchids, grass rivulet and sooty chimney sweeper moths. Big bush crickets. Devil’s bit, eyebright and dyer’s greenweed.

We had quite a picnic.

Later, in the cool of evening, we made our way down to a trout pool on the stream, well hidden behind hazel and trees. A magic place. A fish jumped. I dipped my long pond net to see what was in there...and the net came off the handle and was lost...in deep water. “That’s it”, I said, “I’m gonna have to strip right off, put my wellies back on” (cos of the sharp stones) “and go under to feel for it.” I did...and found the net! Triumph!! I scrambled out, dripping from head to wellies. My friend had the camera. “Take my photo like this” I laughed. “It’s unmissable!” She has more sense than me. No photo was taken...and just as well.

But old Puck was watching, we said, hiding in the bushes and chuckling…

And I still chuckle too, nine years later, every time I think of that...