August Reflections The Dog Days In late July and August, Sirius (known as the Dog Star), appears to rise at the same time as the sun. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the belief was that the combined heat of the two stars led to intolerable blazing hot weather, which in turn resulted in thunderstorms, fires, drought, high fever, and madness – a period known as the dog days. Today the phrase tends to evoke the hot, lazy days of summer, and until recently this time of year has been known as the ‘silly season’, described by the Cambridge Dictionary as a time:  ‘usually in the summer, when newspapers are full of stories that are not important because there is no important, especially political, news’.  The silly season, if it ever really existed, is now in the past, and today’s news bulletins are more likely to lead to despair. Wars are raging around the world with scant hopes for peaceful resolutions. The climate emergency is terrifying. In Britain, dreadful harms have been inflicted on wome