Holidays...yes, again

Ooh, off to France tomorrow.  I've had a long and demanding day chez office too, which helps, as I'm now frothing at the gash for the off.  Even the flight, normally a tiresome process, is filled with appeal.  Whilst queueing up at Gatwick with the great unwashed tomorrow morning, I won't be at work for a start.  I'm actively looking forward to security, the inevitable Pret pain au raisin (candy floss for graduates) and spending £30 on magazines for a 90 minute flight.

In other news, I'm on the wagon at the moment.  I always enjoy doing this, but only when I'm doing this.  It's odd, but I find that not drinking during the week increases my energy levels during the evening.  It also makes every night different.  I keep thinking to myself "what shall I do this evening?"  And, yet, despite this knowledge, I always fall off the weekday wagon.  And then it's a wrench to climb back aboard.  No matter, I'm enjoying it thus far.

What to do this evening?  I could carve a new nut for my guitar, dismantle the dishwasher or even get in the loft and replace the extractor fan.  Or I could just stare off into the middle distance, like last night.

Getting to know you

I think I may be coming to terms with Autumn at last.  There is a certain joy to be taken from the turning of the seasons.  People who live in uniformly temperate climes tend to point this out when the rest of us whine about our meteorological lot.  I suppose this makes sense.  There's a well-know psychological phenomenon known as The Hawthorne Effect.  I won't go into the whys-and-wherefores of this mental state, but it can be summed up as improvements in performance and behaviour can be observed in subjects who are aware that they are being watched.  This effect can to triggered by a change in one's environment.  The change can be beneficial or detrimental; it matters not which.  This change makes the subject feel loved, albeit in hugely abstracted way, and they react in a positive way.

I suppose it follows then that as we enter the cusp of the seasons, we too feel this benefit.  It manifests itself (for me at least) in a joy at the rediscovery of sweaters, root vegetables and Benilyn.  Also, I should declare an interest.  October is my birthday month, so I feel like the centre of attention for a bit, and associate the feelings of pleasure this scrutiny affords me with the return of autumn.  It does take a while to kick-in though.  The first few dark mornings are a real elbow in the solar plexus for one's psyche.

Don't tell me, don't tell me...tell me.

I've kick started my Times crossword habit again...again recently.  It's a funny thing, my relationship with the old TC.  It one of those disciplines, like playing a musical instrument or doing a headstand, that requires constant practice.  And yet despite knowing this, I always let it slip.  So months elapse between crossword events, and then I'm up against it.

The problem with crossword hiatuses, for you non-crossword types out there, is that the brain softens and runs to mental fat when you don't practice.  This makes the reintroduction of cryptic crosswords to your routine a demanding, and initially unrewarding, undertaking.  Your brain, which is programmed by evolution to make short mental leaps betwixt logic stepping stones, will not take to cryptic, lateral thinking.  It's like learning to touch your toes: initially the hamstrings will complain. 

What doesn't drown us, and all that...

Great Scott, it's wet in London at the mo.  My advisers tell me it's also pissing down throughout the sceptred isle, but I can't vouch for that.  It's always the way with the weather here: one minute it's as dry as a camel's chuff and the next it's hurling down stairrods and people are fleeing their homes for higher ground.

The rain over the last couple of days has been of that particularly viscose and tenacious variety.  Try as you might to cover up with oilskins and tarpaulins, you are going to get wet.  Getting properly sloshed on, like this, makes one feels weak and brittle.  Also, despite attacking them with blotting paper and talc, I cannot stop my trotters from feeling perpetually damp in this weather.  This is the most uncomfortable feeling available in a largely civilised society.  It's awful.

To add to the discomfort, Mrs O and I are off to Montpelier on Friday for a long weekend.  We've been to the south of France many many times over the nuptial years, and, believe me, when it pisses down there, it's does it with brio and reckless abandon.  So we're hoping against hope that it stays dry on the riviera for duration of our stay.

I remember one trip to Arles a few years ago when the heavens opened and they had 6 months' worth of rain in an afternoon.  Needless to say, the town struggled to cope.  The roof of the train station cracked under the pressure of water.  This shorted-out the lights and information boards.  Not that it mattered much, the trains had all been cancelled as they can't swim.  So that was that.  

Also, we'd rented a down house on the banks of the Rhone.  In the hours following the deluge, the river swelled to an alarming degree.  Huge uprooted trees, cars and the bloated corpses of unfortunate cattle swept past our holiday home for hours on end.  In the end Mrs O couldn't take it any more, and insisted we leg it up the nearest hill and check into a hotel.  This we did.  I had enough French at my disposal to explain that my wife "had fear of the inundations" and "could we have a room in the attic please?".

As it happens, the river didn't break its banks and all was well.  It was touch and go though.

The locals were annoyingly stoical and calm throughout.  They just stood at the flood defences for bit, staring at the maelstrom.  Then they'd have a fag and pull faces at each other.  Mrs O was beside herself at this.  "Who's in charge?  Where are the police, the fire brigade?" she'd ask.  "At lunch, I expect."

Chapeaux, old chappo.

I happened across a fascinating article on the BBC web site earlier today.  It concerns the life of a chap called Patrick Leigh Fermor.  A book of his, frankly outstanding, wartime adventures in north Africa has just been published.

His escapades in Nazi-occupied Egypt would have been enough for most mortals to dine out on for at least a thousand earth years.  But with PLF, it appears to be just the tip of the iceberg.  As an apparently unemployable 18-year-old, for example, he decided to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.  He travelled light, bringing only "several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes".

I adore people like this, old-school genteel English nutters.  He sounds like a man of enormous native intelligence and self-effacing good humour.  He also had a reputation for being worldly and sophisticated, but utterly without pretension.  On the strength of this article alone, I rushed down to the bookshop and bought his account of his extraordinary walk, A Time Of Gifts.  I can't wait to get started on it.

Mrs O and I have a longish train journey to get through tomorrow and I cannot countenance train travel without a diverting tome to ease the path.  Who knows where this new book lead me?  If sufficiently inspired, I too might walk somewhere.  Kazakhstan perhaps.  How far is that?  Hmm...maybe I'll start with Belgium.

Straddle bags

We're in a funny period of the year at present.  Everyone's at sea because the shift from late summer to full-on winter was compressed into about 600 minutes this year.  A little over a week ago, Mrs O and I would spending the evenings in the beer garden of our local, basking in the relative heat.  Now, London resembles a vast grey paddy field, with pools of standing water and a constant gale blowing.  To compensate for the hellish prospect of winter (yeah, another one), the wife and I have a number of mini-breaks planned to lighten the drizzly load.  We visiting several of England's provincial cities.

England is blessed with a good number of fascinating cities, but you'd be hard-pressed to know it.  The county is ridiculously London-centric.  People from the provinces blame Londoners for this, but in my experience, most cockneys just want to be left alone to enjoy their home town.  We don't want the place to be overrun every September by an army of recent graduates intent on making their fortune here.  Most of us would like nothing more than for the streets, tubes, buses and pubs of London to be slightly less frantic than they currently are.

This mania for all-things-London has reached its civil engineering apotheosis with the frankly ludicrous HS2 rail scheme.  For those of you unaware of this stunt, the plan is to build a high-speed railway link from London to Birmingham, and then onwards to the north.  This it's argued will rejuvenate the midlands and north by slightly reducing the time it takes company directors to travel to the capital...on expenses.

HS1, which passes very close to my home, is a wonderful example of elegant white elephantiasis.  It's spectacularly under-subscribed.  This is due to its being eye-wateringly expensive.  Now and again, Mrs O and I will treat ourselves to a jolly to the coast of Kent using it.  But it's really in the same category as a trip over the Malvern Hills in a hot air balloon might be.  I certainly wouldn't use it more than four times a year.  It's just too rich for my blood.

Still, I'm sure the second one will be much better than the first.  They'll have learnt their lessons from the first flawed stab.  Oh, yes.

Water Sports

I got monumentally soaked this morning on the ride in to work.  The weather has taken a sneaky turn for the worse over the last few days.  When I left the house it was grey and unpleasant-looking, but basically dry.  A mile into the commute and the heavens opened.

In fairness it's vee rare to get dumped on like this while riding to work.  People always ask "What do you do when it rains?" This question is predicated on the wrong-headed assumption that it pisses down 50% of the time in London.  Fact is, it doesn't.  It rains very infrequently, and when it does, it's in short bursts.  So the chances of catching the deluge full in the face on one or both legs of a 40 commute are slight.

Despite my years of empirical evidence as too the dryness of the region I live in, I, like many Londoners, find it amazing when hosepipe bans are announced.  The received "wisdom" among Londoners at times like this is that any shortage of fluid in the taps is due exclusively to leaky pipework that Thames Water should have fixed by now, and not to the climate being fcuked.  People who labour under this misapprehension get, understandably but incorrectly, hacked-off when these strictures are announced.  Some belligerent cockneys (yes, there are a few) even refuse to kowtow until the water companies crack and undertake the remedial works.  They demonstrate their ire at monopoly capitalism like this by washing their cars as frequently as those of us closer to the middle of the sanity bell curve brush our teeth.

I think the primary cause of this incredulity is the fact that it's so cloudy in the south east.  Drought areas at least benefit from unbroken azure skies and glorious sunshine, don't they?  That's the quid pro quo for not being able to raise geraniums.  It seems unfair and impossible that we who suffer so much light pollution from a low grey cloud base should also be denied the opportunity to splash about a bit if so inclined.

What were our geography teachers talking about when we were kids?  They insisted that cumulo-nimbus clouds held rain.  Not the ones that reach us, it seems.  They're shit, like old teabags.

Doesn't seen fair somehow.