O for a beaker of the warm south...

I swear I had the very best intentions to vary my repertoire and give my more lyrical side an airing. All was well until the very last minute when a thorough soaking by the delights of the English 'summer' drowned all other thoughts from my mind. And so all I can muster is a good old fashioned rant at the insult that passes for that season in this unpleasantly green and sodden land. And by 'old-fashioned' rant I mean it, and can spout off knowing I do so among the very best company. Our finest poets head up a venerable tradition of meteorological moaners.

I'll let Shakespeare explain. His 34th sonnet asks:

Why did thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?

Yep, you and me both Bill. And not just rotten 'smoke', but pissing, incessant rain too. It matters not that the point of his sonnet is to decry the fickleness of his beloved, whose mind and affections change like the weather. For he evidently speaks eloquently from experience. For as he declares in the sonnet before that one:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace...

This is a man who has clearly done as I have done today - thrown caution to the wind, and been hoodwinked by the absurd fiction denoted by the date on the calendar, and the fact that it was sunny when I set out in sandals. Serves me bloody well right, you might protest. We have scientific 'weather forecasts' now, when in Shakespeare's day they had merely quaint folk wisdom. My arse. I make it a principle never to consult weather forecasts. They will either (a) delude me with false promise of sunshine, or (b) depress me with their firm conviction of the opposite. And, besides, the other day I faltered, and did consult the BBC up-to-the-minute 'forecast' for the next day, but I couldn't get beyond the what-the-weather-is-doing-in-London-at-this-precise-moment window, which simply beggared belief. Whilst the whizzy flash display had black clouds and torrential rain, my wide survey of the skies for as far as the eye could see revealed the opposite. Whilst Shakespeare's weather prognosticators might not have had bleeding great computers and flashy displays to assist his decision on what dress might be suitable for his day's adventure, they probably had the sense to at least peep out of the window before hazarding an opinion on at least the current state of meteorological play.

Everywhere I turned today was confirmation of the dismal, depressing, and ancient scandal of our climate. I spent the day damply reading Keats's letters in the British Library, as the rain thrummed incessantly down. Keats, standing equidistant between Shakespeare's day and ours, had a similar time of it. In 'spring' 1818 he had joined his brother in Devon where he had travelled in the hope that the climate of the 'English Rivera' as it would later laughably be called, would improve his fragile health. Some hope. Keats wrote to a friend how he had wished to send him a picturesque description of the county, but he wasn't seeing much of it. Or anything - confined day after day, week after week inside, 'with a sense of being drown'd and rotted like a grain of Wheat'. He declared that is is 'Impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches', and not unreasonably wondered who would live here 'when there is such a place as Italy? ... Rain! Rain! Rain!'. There was indeed, such a place as Italy, and there still is, and incidentally it was 34 degrees and sunny today in Rome, with much the same for the forecastable future. And in Rome it is the very height of summer, and they might very well dread (yes, dread), the prospect of another 2 months at least of this stuff. Sigh. Yet poor Keats didn't get to Rome until it was too late. Before this last desperate bid for health the furthest he travelled was Scotland. He went on a walking holiday of the north a few months after his rain-soaked sojourn in Devon. This was technically summer, but appears to have been no drier.

Where is this all going, you might wonder. It's not really going anywhere. Beyond the declaration that this is simply wrong. it was wrong for Shakespeare (a poet who couldn't bring himself to compare his love to a summer's day, because, frankly, in England, that wouldn't be a compliment, and he'd have got a clip round his ear for his troubles); it was wrong for poor old Keats, soaked and rotted into an early grave. And it's wrong now. To have your central heating on in early August is simply wrong. To spend what's supposed to be the most joyous season of one year (make that 2, as last year was even worse), of the short span of life allotted to us avoiding puddles of dirty water is wrong. I will continue to rant and rage against the dying of this light as our summer dies of a certain consumption before our very eyes. If anyone reading this comes from 'such a place as Italy', then rejoice in your good fortune, survey the blue dome above your head, breathe in a draught of that warm south, a draught of life - as it's meant to be lived....

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.

The rain from Spain must have followed my plane

I'm cursed. I've just come back from Madrid, where it rained for nearly the whole time. The first few days were lovely, there first really hot sun they had had. How lucky I was, they told me. But then, I suppose my luck ran out, and was washed down the drain with persistent, near perpetual pissing down. Inky skies and overflowing gutters is not what I've come to expect from Madrid. Not what I expect from a holiday, full stop. When I board a plane it is to outsource that big yellow thing we don't have here, and it just isn't a holiday unless I get it. Call me superficial. Declaim on the architectural gems, masterpiece-stocked museums, and culinary bounties of the great cities of the world; but, as the world shrinks, British food gets better, and the Internet allows us to roam the globe from the comfort of an armchair, the ultimate need, the ultimate elusive entity is sunshine. Especially for me.

And especially now. I had gone to Madrid to get my fix, after a long winter, and to get a publicity tan. How can I promote my book about sunshine, claiming to be an authority and world-class professional sun-worshipper if i'm as peely wally as an old potato? Well that particular plan came to nought. For five days I was treated to near-Biblical downpours. If my face is any darker, it's from the raging apoplexy of righteous indignation I've whipped myself into at my bad luck. That or rust.

And on the 6th day, the clouds departed. But, alas, me with them. I swear we towed the bastard things back with us. The skies over Gatwick looked suspiciously familiar, and welcomed me back by resuming their business on my head. God, I need a holiday.