Weather.
I am looking out at a scene of total dreariness. I got back from London a few days ago in the middle of a massive whirlwindy storm, the worst in June for fifty years, and it has made the garden look like cr@p. Up until then we had had about six weeks of perfect sunshine so there were roses everywhere and things had even emerged from the vegetable garden, without being slugged back to ground level before you could remember what you had sown.

My son had luckily been staying for three of those weeks and left reluctantly saying that maybe he could just live here for ever. Even the swimming pool temperature had climbed from my husband's preferred mountain spring level (maintained by somehow wedging the gage on 'low') to what the pool man, and we, describe as 'normal', by the power of the sun alone. My son and I were bronzed and carefree. Had started minor exercise programmes to hone our flabby exposed bodies and were living on large numbers of melons. The strains of cool South American j@zz drifted from the many open windows.

Why do we never learn? This is NOT what gl0bal w@rming means. Those charming weeks were just a random fluke. After the storm there were ripped off branches and bent double or fallen trees everywhere. There was hardly a flower left in the garden or even in the grass out in the fields and the swimming pool temperature had fallen fifteen degrees. The forecast is 'blustery showers' for the foreseeable future - about the most dispiriting weather you could conceive when you are trying to do Summer things. As we speak it is so dark in this room that I need the light on.

Naturally my son and older daughter have just arrived for a two week holiday. We spent yesterday crouched round the kitchen table, moaning. It was exactly as I imagine the lives of three toads based under a large stone. The word 'dank' sums it up. And this is pretty much normal for here but as soon as the sun comes out you seem to forget, instantly, and skip about happily as if the rain was just some momentary interruption of our golden world. Is this a trick of Nature to ensure an even spread of the earth's population? That northern peoples have some kind of switch in their brain which stops their short-term memory? Tell me - it's a world-wide conspiracy of silence isn't it. So that we don't all suddenly wake up and head south.
- posted by Iris @ 6/30/2004 09:39:00 AM comment