Never go back

Well, well, I'm back in London and back at work after five glorious days in west Cornwall.  It was an especially relaxing sojourn this time.  It was my mother-in-law's birthday, so we entertained at theirs one day and spent the rest of the time gadding about, eating asparagus and drinking gin.  The sun never stopped shining, not neither.  So, all-in-all, it was a real wrench to come home yesterday.

I've mentioned before how well-disposed I am by inclination for retirement.  This trip confirmed the hypothesis.  I could quite happily retire.  All I need is the mortgage paid and modest pension, just enough to keep me in bikes and beer.  The only other possibility would be to become a minor royal, but that's a long-shot, let's face it.  I'm a bit too "below-stairs".  And a Catholic.  Also, there is an undeniably tedious element to royal life.  Opening hospices is not for me.  I'm too shy.  That said, I do have quite a regal bearing - always have had.  And were I ennobled, I'd insist on wearing a fez, just to mix it up a bit.

 - I declare this hospice open.  Just like that.

The Sun Has Got His Fez On

It appears that Spring has finally sprung in the old country this week.  The weather stunned us all by pulling its finger out.  In a massive about turn, it decided it had had enough of sh1tting down stairrods on the wretched inhabitants of the sodden island and would ease off for a bit.  And very welcome it is too, this wanton act of kindness.

The last six months has been bereft of seasons here.  It's just been a relentless one-act Kafkaesque production of warm-ish drizzle and low grey cloud.  The English are no strangers to sheight weather of course, but even they had had a gut full of this stuff by the end of February this year.  People would laugh ever so slightly too hysterically when the subject of the weather came up.  "Ooh, I expect the weekend will be awful" - cue shrill strained giggling and facial ticks.

But all that's behind us now.  One useful outcome of the battering we've all taken over the last few months is that expectations are at an all-time low.  If the weather broke now, and it didn't stop raining until November (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Eastenders), people would probably settle for that.  "Remember that week in March," they'd reminisce "when it stopped raining for nearly 95 hours?  Great days..."

As Henry Hill observed in the opening monologue to Goodfellas "...everybody has to take a beating some time."  Well said, aitch.