The heat is off

Phew, it's getting warm - a subtle reminder to the populace that it's still technically the middle of summer.  There's a temptation to think the season over now as the World Cup has just ended.  I had to remind Mrs O last night that we had most of our summer jollies still to look forward to, so pucker-up!  This is a shameless role-reversal for me as I'm ordinarily the one with a face like a clattered asshole.  Yet, here I was, bestriding the front room like an upbeat colossus.  I can only suppose this optimism is my unconscious mind trying to deal with triple-digit humidity.

The wife and I usually take our holidays late in the year to avoid the great unwashed and their mewling progeny.  This year we had planned to go to Tel Aviv but John Simpson advised against it.  Instead we're having a series of mini-breaks in Spain and Germany.

On the surface, they're uneasy bedfellows, Germany and Spain, but each offers the wise traveller a wonderful playground in its own way.  People always cock-on about visiting this monument and that restaurant when they're on hols, like it's some sort of Ironman competition.  You're there to relax and enjoy yourself, you dozy twat.  People who claim that they're not interested in a bit of low impact R&R during the vacs and prefer instead to yomp or go pot-holing need an electric shock to the brain, frankly.  When I go on a mini break, I want things to be different, other and new.  What I don't want is onerous.  This is why S&G offer very different cultural mores, but similar experiences.

How do you like your brandy, sir? - In a glass.

It's been humid for a few days in old London town, not humid in a traditional summer sense, just a little damper than we're used to.  Despite the discomfort this brings, I welcome it.  It's June, for the love of Jesus, it's supposed to be humid.  When I was a boy (here we go...), summers were excruciating in their humidity.  Not now though - something happened to the jet stream or something in 2006 and the weather went to heck in a handcart.

At least when it's hot and humid, you feel like you've lived every moment, even if you've actually spent the entire day playing Tetris on your computer at work.  Typing-up vanilla meeting minutes is autumnal work, like putting semi-conscious tortoises into garden sheds or eating roasted tubers.  No, humidity is good.  It's difficult to sleep, but you can pretend you're Philip Marlowe whilst you toss and turn.  If it's too hot to sleep, I'll sometimes get up and sit alone in the kitchen until the small hours, wearing nothing but a trilby and sipping cold tea from a highball tumbler.  It's just as well summers in the UK are short, or I'd crack due to lack of sleep.

As it's not too miserable out, I took a wander down to the river at Westferry at lunchtime.  There is nothing more soothing than the sound of The Thames at slack water.  It lulls me in seconds, my mood notwithstanding.  You can take the boy out of London....