Love Sunshine

My first posting, although it will be the culmination of many weeks, months even years of ruminations. I should have started this earlier, but I now have a purpose for a spot, so today seems a good time to dip my toe into the blogsphere.

The purpose. I’m trying to put together a website devoted to celebrating and sharing sunshine. It will be at www.lovesunshine.org when I have content, design, functionality, layout and everything else sorted. I’m making very slow progress as I try to scale a near vertical learning curve equipped with near zero resources, less understanding and no common sense or technical ability. O, and very little time. I do have lots of wonderful chums ‘though, who are giving me a leg up as I attempt to get my head round the various decisions and scary complexities involved in going public in hyperspace. If it’s still called that.

Why today? Because I can have a good old moan about the weather. The glorious and decidedly uncharacteristic summer we were enjoying until a few days ago has given up on us, and left me - a hopeless sun-addict - speechless with indignation. Or vociferous rather. The newspapers had all been predicting an August even hotter than the record-breaking July, and I was looking forward to another month of blue skies, scorching sun, outdoor living, accomplished BBQs, and a life fulfilled by a proper allocation of regular reliable sunshine. An exotic window had opened to us in England. Affording a glimpse of another world. One we usually only see in brief tantalizing episodes – the ‘sunny spells’ that fleetingly cast their glamour over us here – or when we outsource the stuff overseas. I was just getting used to planning things, eating outdoors, and prostrating myself on grass the colour and texture of Wheatabix. I like grass to look like Wheatabix. It’s the sign of a good summer.

But after a few bouts of torrential rain, and a few days of grim, grey porridgey skies we are slipping into an alarmingly familiar pattern of business-as-bloody-borringly usual in grey old London. It’s starting to restore the green, the grumpy faces, and already the women are wearing their winter styles. A Pox on it. (The weather was exactly like this exactly 2 years ago today.*)

And why am I particularly miffed today? Because my special sun-hood I ordered for working outside in the sunshine arrived today. Just to rub it in. I ordered it weeks ago when, after about 7 weeks of reliable sunshine, I wasn’t getting a stroke of work done, and thought I ought to find a way of typing and tanning at the same time. As it is simply impossible for me to be inside when the sun shines outside this thing should be the answer to my prayers. Should have been. My prayers now focus on the return of the sunshine. Please, weather gods. Just one last, sustained, and truly infernal, burst before we go into winter. It would mean so much to me…

*How do I remember what the weather was like 2 years ago? Because:(a) I’m an obsessive. I have a personal and personally aggrieved recollection of what our summers were like stretching back to at least 1982. (I can recall them if anyone’s interested. Which is unlikely. I discovered recently how obsessive this is when I distributed a questionnaire on people’s attitude to sunshine, which included a question about summers past. And few could even remember what last summer was like.) (b) Two years ago today I had my first date with my last girlfriend – who cruelly dumped me back in February. And so I have a particularly acute, and self-indulgently melancholy, recollection of the day. The summer – which was bleedin lousy that year – gave up completely that day (with a few brief showings later on). So I’m stricken with foreboding as well as a general brooding sulkiness recalling what might have been. The great dreamy promise that glimmered out that day and the early days and weeks following. The fools gold of an ultimately doomed relationship. The clouds got in the way.