Another beautiful day,  but this time it was really pushing it. I had to cram myself into the alley heading riverwards from St Olaf’s car park, and just about managed to see the Sun in the Shard between the buildings, ceilings and railings.

Looking north from here, this is probably the last time I’ll get this shot in a long while. I’d thought from the outset there would be problems. Just north of St Olaf House is the Thames, and the shadow would spend a while crossing that, both in autumn and back again in spring. Short of launching a kayak and fighting the tide and the wakes I’d have no chance of repeating this shot, so I’d have to rely on sharp shadows and the vagaries of distant landmarks to estimate its location, along with a lot of peering at pixels on Google Maps.

And even after the river crossing, the shadow would creep north to the City. The Shard is tall alright, the tallest building for a long long way, but the rest of the City of London is hardly low-rise cottages with extensive views to the south. The shadow will fall on a lot of tall buildings. I’ll have to plan the winter half of it. I hope for chance alignments and gaps and alleys. It’s going a long way north of here.

Four weeks later I made it back again. This was a bit more of a surreptitious mission, I was out with a friend and I hadn’t told him, and we walked to London Bridge intent on carrying on the previous night’s revelries. That was the easy part of course, we’d had years of practice at that. I was watching the clock as we walked, but as luck would have it the timing was impeccable, I didn’t have to break stride and we reached the dark shadow at 1pm on the nose. This time it was in a notably different spot, by a parked car outside St Olaf House. He looked nonplussed at my sudden photography and we moved on. It wasn’t even 13:01 before we were back on the move to The Rake.

I’d never heard of St Olaf House before, nor indeed of St Olaf. Apparently in 1014 he sailed a fleet up the Thames and helped Aethelred the Unready fight off Canute in a battle at London Bridge, so the dedication seems fair enough.

The later details of why he was made a saint, how he has a church (or five) in central London named after him and why he remains venerated today in Norwegian folklore, well, that was a rabbit hole. Seems he wasn’t a Christian at all, instead a mere raider of less defended shores and a failed claimant to a vacant throne, and his lionisation in Norway was later co-opted by the Church as a way to retroactively claim a national hero to bring the people under the yoke of Christianity. That stuff really works huh.

Soon-to-be-Saint Olaf died in 1030 at the Battle of Stiklestad, although even this sounds more like an internecine murder dressed up as martyrdom after the event. Still, the popular mythology is that he Christianised Norway and he’s got a chunk of London named after him. Not bad for a pagan raider and a petty king.

It was a much nicer day a couple of weeks later, although a few clouds rolled in just in time to make it interesting. Still, at least you can see the Sun in this shot. I have to admit this was at 13:01 – I was there and snapping at 13:00 on the nose, but this was just a better picture.

It’d been 12 days and nothing changes fast at this time of year. Well, the pubs would open the next day for the first time in what felt like years yet somehow a felt like a couple of weeks. But nothing changes much with the Sun. I went to the same spot as before and took a couple of steps and it was more-or-less the same view.

This wasn’t a surprise but it did make it harder when it came to putting things on the map. Not least as I had to try to factor in being two minutes earlier. I only realised later you can record the exact GPS co-ordinates of your phone photos, but that’s a story for the autumn. So these are basically side by side on top of each other, this a smidgen west of the last, at the highest of high summer with the Sun stock still high in the sky.

There’d never been a spring like spring 2020. There was plague in the air and not a cloud in the sky. I’d grown two beards and lost two kilos. London was quiet. Everyone was going a bit stir crazy.

But at least by the summer solstice we were allowed to visit people’s gardens. We went hog wild with a friend on the Saturday night before she drifted off in daylight and a daze. I woke about midday on the 21st. The unflinching catatonia beside me made it clear I’d have to make my own fun, so I walked down to the Shard and took a photo of the Sun through its pincer-like tip.

I was two minutes late thanks to cloud, a closed stairwell and hungover planning, but it’s a start.

I’d thought about taking this photo for a while, and all the others it would lead to. I’d never got round to it for many reasons, mainly that it’d always been miles away. But that winter in the last gasps of normality I’d moved east and it was now a short walk at weekends, and then come March like most other people I was at home all the time. No excuses.

I’d wanted to start on the equinox on 20^th March, but everyone had wanted to do something on 20^th March, so I felt in good company not doing anything but staying in and getting trashed.

But still, the 21^st June was the first day of summer and the Shard’s shadow was as short as it would ever be, so it’s as good a place to start as any. As it turns out, at 1pm on June 21^st the shadow of the tip of the Shard falls just south of the north pavement of Duke Street Hill, on a pedestrian crossing just outside an entrance to London Bridge tube station. If you stand there and look up, making sure the cars have stopped of course, the two prongs frame the Sun pretty neatly.

Sadly you can’t see this here because my photos were rubbish, as well as being two minutes late, so you’ll have to trust me, or head there next year. There was a fleeting glimpse of a disc between the clouds, honest.