Love Sunshine

Inside

OK. I’d held off commenting, but a serious soaking, from which I’m still squelching prompts me to post on this awful weather. Maybe my expectations had been substantially lowered after the disgrace of last year. Perhaps the near miraculous completion of Glastonbury and most of Wimbledon without significant meteorological molestation had lulled me into a false sense of security, and to believe in summer once more. Not a corker or a scorcher, but a workable, I-can-live-with-that version of the kind of weather children’s books and advertisers suggest should happen at this time of year. But it changed at the weekend and an alarming sense of déjà vu is creeping in from last year, and I feel duty bound to comment.

At first I manage to rise above it, and accept that into this life and onto our gardens some rain must fall. But far too much has now fallen on mine. What irks most is the return to ‘inside’ as our allotted sphere and condition of life. There’s a awful lot of inside in this country. If an Englishman’s home is his castle then it is one nearly constantly under siege. True, some people appear to be quite happy with this, and, as if there was not enough genuine inside to go round, they choose to spend hours watching morons self-incarcerated in fish-bowl prisons of discount fame on the goggle box.

But I’m not a fan of inside. I’d got used to outside, and was enjoying it. Meals tasted good under balmy air each evening. BBQ charcoals were not allowed to pass their sell-by date, and were even replenished. Garden furniture got used to not being moved in and out each day, and the grass started to assume my favourite shade: digestive biscuit. Life slipped through the door we'd left open while we were outside.

As the snails re-claim the courtyard, and chlorophyll the grass, I have to accept there are fewer excuses for not tending to my blog. And so, for all our sakes, let’s pray for a prompt end to inside.