Whether the weather be fine...

I hadn't intended getting up early this morning. The first day of the school holidays, I was going to sleep until lunchtime. The guy over the road, on the other hand, thought it was the perfect morning for sawing through tree-trunks. To avoid the heat of the day, he decided to start early. The Husband then thought he would do a bit of garden clearance, in our garden, for a change. I've probably said before that he's a gardener. By the time he finishes for the day, he doesn't want to cut any more grass, pull up any more weeds etc. That's why our whole garden looks like the 'wildlife corner' you're encouraged to have. We have piles of dead leaves, an over-grown hedge and lots of, erm, wild-flowers. (Remember, 'a weed is just a flower in the wrong place'...) Anyway, at 8.30, The Husband decided to take a pile of rubble to the tip. To do this, he had to use a wheelbarrow to ferry it from the back garden to the van. Rather than walk too far, he hurled great chunks of concrete into the metal wheelbarrow from several feet away. I need to apologise to the neighbours. When he came in and saw me making a very strong coffee, he looked surprised and said, 'You're up early. I thought you were having a lie-in?' 

Of course, now it's nearly lunchtime, and rather hot outside, everyone's gone indoors and it's totally silent. Yes, we still have sunshine. It's been warm for, what, about two weeks now? And we're in Britain. People are starting to complain. Two weeks is an awfully long time to have the same weather. The British Summer is typically, I read somewhere, three days of sun and a thunderstorm. 

The British weather seems to break records every year, although I view these statistics with scepticism. So we had the coldest Easter since 1910? That just means that, in 1910, Easter was colder. No doubt this Summer will be the hottest since last year, but anyone who was around in 1976 will scoff and recall taking buckets to stand-pipes when all the water dried up, and how you couldn't stand still for too long, or your flip-flops stuck to the path. Those were the days...

People moan about how poorly prepared Britain is for hot weather. But we're poorly prepared for any weather apart from rain. So we get a week of snow a year, when everything grinds to a halt and people say, 'Bet the trains don't stop running in Sweden.' No, they don't, because they get snow a lot more than us. We're rubbish in heat-waves because we only get those for a week, too. We have everything. We even famously had a hurricane in 1987 which, compared to those in America, was probably more of a light breeze, but it did knock trees down and throw things around, and we got all excited at the fact we'd had Real Weather. The weather we can cope with is rain. Because we get a lot of it. Last Christmas, I wrote about how The Daughter travelled here from Cornwall narrowly avoiding the floods. While she was here, we worriedly watched the news and saw how the train lines she needed for her journey back were all being washed away. Yet, three days later, they'd all been drained and repaired and life was back to damp normality. 

No doubt our little Summer will come to an end soon, and we can start complaining about the rain again. The farmers will be on the news telling us how prices will have to increase because of the sun/rain, as they do each year, no matter what weather we've just had. 

Hope your weather's doing what you want it to.