Well, as they say up North, the nights are fair drawing in.

It’s all downhill to Christmas now, and we haven’t even had our summer holidays yet. But by the immutable laws of the Universe, the northern hemisphere enjoyed its longest daylight of the year yesterday, and the sun is already beginning its migration back to Bondi and other points south.

Not that we will notice the difference immediately. As the Sun reaches its northern limit, above the Tropic of Cancer, it teeters a bit before turning round. God created the heavens as a slightly imperfect watch.

At Greenwich yesterday on the summer solstice, the Sun rose at 4.43am and set at 9.21pm, giving London 16 hours and 38 minutes of daylight. Five hundred miles north in Aberdeen, where it barely gets dark at all at this time of year, the street lights were on only from 10.38 last night to 3.42 this morning.

The ancients built stone circles to greet the first rays of the solstice. Some 24,000 of their descendants, some clad in antlers, black cloaks and oak leaves, gathered at Stonehenge yesterday to celebrate the first rays touching the 5,000-year-old Heel Stone.

The Druids raised a cheer at 4.58 which, they believed, was the moment of sunrise. Scientific data put the actual moment at Stonehenge at 4.49 – it being somewhat west of Greenwich – but in the end it didn’t matter much; it was cloudy.

Numbers at Stonehenge were swelled by hundreds of passers-by on their way to another mystic rite, the Glastonbury Festival, where worship is of the mud rather than the sun.