But simmer in Scotland is not all doom and gloom. We have the simmer-dim, that period when, in Shetland, the night sky does not get dark, but the sun just dips below the horizon before rising again at once. Sometimes it even gets hot enough to observe simmer-cowts or simmer-flaws — the quivering motion of the air on a hot day, as remembered in a 19th-century song: “Dae ye mind lang syne, when the simmer days were fine, When the sun it shone far brichter than it’s evir duin sin syne? Dae ye mind the ha brig turn whaur we guddled in the burn, And were late for the scuil in the mornin?”
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