bank holiday weather

I should have known that, with the first test match of the season being played, a Bank Holiday looming and schools on half term, the glorious weather of a week ago would give place to cold, damp days. Perhaps appropriately, the week's signs of political and financial insecurity have added to the gloom. Autumn ranges of clothes are already appearing in the shops, although more than three weeks remain before the longest day, and what the television companies call 'a great summer of sport', accurately enough this time, is there to be enjoyed.

I am no ornithologist, but it has been a pleasure this year to hear the cuckoo again, after a cuckooless 2009 and a late appearance this spring. Since the death of Solomon, our much-loved ginger tom, several years ago, we have seen increasing numbers of birds in our small back garden, and have welcomed them with a bird bath and various types of food container. Our fiercely territorial but friendly robin (RVP, obviously) is there all the year round, but woodpeckers, pigeons, tits and many other birds, some of which I can't identify, especially as my cataract ripens, fill the garden with sound. The neighbours' cats regard our garden as an extension of their own, and are made welcome despite what they often leave behind, but they are only a minor threat to the birds, who thumb their noses from their high vantage-points.

The grass will never be better than average (slightly above Wembley's pitch, in other words, which has been laid, I think, eleven times, 'more often than Lady Chatterley', as a Grauniad journo put it the other day), and I am not a keen gardener, but it is a brief annual delight to see the clematis (accent on the first syllable rather than the second, for preference) burst out in purple and mauve between the garage and the fence. There, the Japanese would be proud of me.

turned out nice again

One night less than three weeks ago, Chesham and somewhere in Surrey shared the dubious distinction of having had the lowest overnight temperature in England. We woke to frost-covered roofs and were glad we had brought our hanging baskets into the porch for protection. We had had little rain but skies had usually been grey, interspersed with very few of those warm, sunny days that make people think that the longer hours of daylight really are having a beneficial effect. There were the usual second-wave conversations with friends, after the initial comment on the weather, about how it was hard to know what to wear.

Now everything is different. For the past few days there have been sunny, often cloudless skies and temperatures in the low eighties (or high twenties) over large parts of the country. Last year we were promised a 'barbecue summer' - and any q found trying to pinch the c's place should should be returned to the discotheque where it became confused - but the abuse that rained down on the weather forecasters when we endured another wet summer was largely misplaced, I gather, because apparently it was not the meteorologists who had used the phrase in the first place but a journalist who told us what we were hoping to hear. Not that barbecue summers have any particular appeal, as I am not particularly fond of barbecues, even when my son is skilfully supervising the whole thing. This time we are said to be in for an 'ice cream summer'. That is a far less risky prediction as far as I am concerned, because I am perfectly prepared to enjoy ice cream all the year round, regardless of the temperature. Indeed, when we eat out I am as likely as not to choose ice cream for pudding/dessert/sweet/afters - fight among yourselves - in preference to muctions such as tiramisu, sticky toffee pudding, chocolate mousse or, as we belong to say over to Newlyn, what you mind to.

Already the moaners are complaining about the heat, longing for an end to what will probably be described as Sizzling Britain in tomorrow's papers. I suspect that many of them were complaining after the second fall of snow in the winter, as if any departure from the meanest of average seasonal temperatures indicated that we had somehow become displaced from the Northern Temperate Zone and had no right to be subjected to any departure from the norm. I appreciate that sustained high temperatures can cause severe problems, as can sustained low temperatures and any number of climatic conditions and events over which we can have little or no control, but, perhaps selfishly, I intend to enjoy the long days, the better light - despite the difficulty it causes my cataract-clouded right eye - , and all that goes with them, including, this year, World Cup football, test matches, and meals in the garden. Whatever the meaning, often disputed, of the saying about not casting a clout 'till may be out', I have put away my winter clothes, taken out what I like to regard as my summer wardrobe, including shorts and sandals, and hope the present fine spell lasts until October.

a stranger in these parts

I am a newcomer to what are now known as the social media. As silver surfers go - and I'm still partly a pepper and salt surfer, thank you very much - I have a fairly limited mastery of the various technological means of communication. I use my five-year-old computer, which now makes even me look sprightly, for emails, web searches, writing on Word, this blog and, tentatively, Facebook. I say tentatively because I have only a few 'friends', all of whom invited me to join their list. I issue no invitations of my own, give little information away and refrain from the common practice of telling the world how I am feeling every five minutes. In a way, I suppose, I am not playing the game; but isn't that the point? We have a choice. Similarly, I use my mobile phone only rarely, almost always to make a call when I am out, and very occasionally to send or respond to a text. I do not use it to surf the web, take photographs, play games or do any of the other things I could choose, and pay, to do. In short, it is used only on the most important occasions, such as when, on holiday, I texted from St Mark's Square, Venice (yes, that one, not the one in Milton Keynes) to find out the result of an Arsenal match. Some things really matter.

As in an earlier post on my attitude to English 'accuracy', some may see me as a dinosaur, others as a bit of a groundbreaker (What, he's sixty-eight and is on Facebook?), and a few may see my abilities as about right for a crumbly, although I do have my own teeth and hips. What I do find annoying is the assumption I have heard from several people of my age that all these media will never be more than trivial timewasters. There is every scope for bombast and self-indulgence, but why should we measure the worth of something by its least welcome uses? Now that we live in Chomski's global village, these media enable us to gather around the parish pump for the purpose of relaying the phatic, the fatuous or the fateful, as we choose.

choices

Those weekend blog posts seem to be turning into midweek catch-ups, not that it matters. A quick tour d'horizon, if that's the phrase, is all I feel I want to write about at present. Just back from a long weekend in Worcester, I almost felt that I got close to the spirit of the much-derided speech John Major made about a country at peace with itself. Oh yes. We went to Evesham for the day, our bus going through pretty villages like Wyre Piddle with cricket pitches being prepared for play, found a rowing regatta going on by the river, walked around a delightful park full of families enjoying the excellent, unvandalised facilities, looked around a couple of churches and came back to Worcester for an organ recital in the cathedral. If it sounds like twee Middle England it didn't feel like that, just a slice of the not-particularly-posh Midlands enjoying its weekend. Then on Sunday we went to Evensong at the cathedral. A good choir, or rather Kwa, as the (female) priest kept calling it (in fact ordination seems to require the kind of RP Alan Bennett made fun of almost fifty years ago, for everyone had the cut glass C of E accent and intonation), sang Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, with its setting of what must be among the most eccentric texts used in a place of worship, Christopher Smart's poem in praise of his cat, mice and musical instruments. I buy my tuna fish by the pound wouldn't have been a bad encore, with its decent tune and words that at least make sense. I suppose my wish to hear something by Adrian Batten was pretty optimistic, but I would at least have liked to hear something Elizabethan. The weekend was very relaxing, and we had a meal at perhaps the best Italian restaurant I've come across outside Italy. Unlike Chesham and Worcester, Evesham had plenty of political posters and declarations of allegiance. That kind of thing seems to have fallen out of use since 2005.

Monday's defeat at Blackburn left us feeling utterly fed up. It was a feeble performance, admittedly by a team weakened by yet more injuries and illness, but we still haven't secured third place and there's only one game to go. With Man. U. or Chelsea as champions in waiting , Man. City and Spurs vying for the last Champions League place and tomorrow's General Election likely to lead to several years of continuing national decline, things aren't looking too good. Oh well, we may buy a player or two, you never know. Chamakh looks as if he may be the first, but if we play badly on Sunday I think there will be a lot of discontent at the Emirates, not all of it due to the election result, our immature democracy or the greed of the wunch.