2013 — 15 July: Monday
I can't get too excited about a national cap on welfare benefits1 set at a level that already comfortably exceeds my widower's mite. Protesters claim this will hit large families disproportionately hard. Two words: "birth control".
After the departure of my little weekend horde I need to hoard some more supplies pretty soon. Perhaps before temperatures reach "scorching" again out there? Failing that, I could always break into my Strategic Chocolate Reserve. If it hasn't melted away (or been discovered by said horde).
Wicked irony
My first attempt to paste this little screen capture into Paint needed a three-finger salute for me to be able to kill the Paint process as it was "not responding". Sweet.
Couldn't agree more.
I've dealt with...
... the hollow-sounding echo inside my fridge, and the despairing gurgles from the car's petrol tank. It's time for some serious "feet up" mode. The living room has already reached 26.6C and I continue to dislike the "glorious" weather.
Casting a quick eye over my diary entry for this day in 2009, not only was I reminded of my splendid false colour print of Christa at Land's End (in 1975) but also that peerless Norman Douglas Limerick book.2 I re-acquainted myself with the "old man of Brienz" (page 51) — the subject of the amusing index entry. But, alas, this is a vaguely family web site...
Good fences...
... are supposed to make good neighbours. I've just had to insist (quite hard) to be allowed to make a small contribution to the neatly reworked bit of fence at the side of my house that I share with my latest neighbours. This was the bit that the first neighbour (and first occupant of the house) declined to replace properly when we last did this well over 20 years ago (on the dubious theory that — being sheltered between the two houses — it would never rot). Typical IBMer: Forceful, arrogant, and mistaken, in equal measure. Oh, the tales I could tell...
As far as I can tell...
... my poor little web server over in Texas is currently collapsed in some sort of ungainly (and, I sincerely hope, unplanned) heap, bits strewn every which way. Fingers crossed. [Pause] I presume I've left it too late to get into the iceberg import business?
It's a mere 27.4C in here. I shall sit quietly digesting my delicious sardine salad and bread roll. An elegant sufficiency in this heat.
The heat! The heat!
It occurs to me, having missed the glorious summer of 1959 by being up in Orkney3 — where the rain was nearly constant and usually almost horizontal — the next hot summer I clearly recall was the late Easter of 1965 in the Po valley and Turin.
Let's see... Then there was the beach in the south of France in July 1969. A pretty hot two weeks camping in Cornwall in 1970. The summer of 1976 in Old Windsor. Some pretty awful sunburn on our first trip to Lanzarote in 1977. Ditto in Guernsey in 1978. Even the summer of 1981 (when I moved into this house ahead of Christa and Peter) was pretty hot. Who could forget Texas in July 1984 (104F)? Though it actually didn't feel as bad as Florida (97F) with its inhuman humidity. Florida again in late 1992 in the wake of Hurricane Andrew wasn't too bad... at least all the mosquitos had been blown away from the Everglades. A late New York summer in 1996 almost finished me off, too.
Then there was Meisenheim. Grand grape-growing country it may be, but it was always freezing in winter and boiling in summer. I'm not at my best in heat. Christa doubted I could have survived a Nebraskan summer, too.
But I note I'm still here. [Pause] Sadly, Jake Thackray isn't. Marc Riley's just played his "The last Will and Testament of JT" which I have three variants of, two of them in the collection here. What a lovely song.