Skip to main content

It's nearly summer...


Can I just check something with you?
It’s been worrying me for a couple of weeks now and  it’s about time I developed a decent (if irrational) obsession - It is May, isn’t it? And not March? Right. I’m a bit confused then.

March featured temperatures well in to the 20’s, beautiful sunshine, and the worrying sight of me with more than one button of my shirt undone. Steady, ladies. So far, May has featured rain, chilliness, frosts, hail, more chilliness, more rain, parkiness and very occasional bits of sunshine. Before it rains again. I’ve even been unsure if what I can see is blossom from trees drifting down or a bit of snow. Frankly, even that wouldn’t surprise me.
In fact, just about the only thing to prove we haven’t just got the months starting with ‘M’ muddled up is that it’s not completely dark at 10pm now, which is a bit unfortunate, really. It just gives us more time to spot how damn cold it is and yet another opportunity to stare forlornly as more precipitation deposits itself liberally outside.

Whilst much of England recently had drought orders lifted (and residents wearing wellies, bailing out their living rooms and wondering why they couldn’t use a hose pipe when their flowerbeds were under 6 inches of water, pondered the irony), here in Cumbria the weather has been surprisingly... normal. Normal for Cumbria, anyway.
It should be a bit warmer though. I’m still wearing a shirt, jumper and coat first thing in the morning at the moment. And then I have to get out of bed to go to work, too.

Is there someone we can write to about this? Surely money spent on the Leveson Inquiry could be redirected so that we can find a solution to this terrible problem. After all, I could have told you it was somewhat dodgy to hack people’s phones, and that those (allegedly) in charge should have known about it, and I’d have done it for ten quid and a slap up lunch from the chip shop. And without needing to call celebrities as witnesses.  You could then spend the millions of pounds saved on... well, I don’t know, really. That’s why we need the research, see?
Of course, Ma Nature has an interesting way of making you look like a prat at any opportunity. By the time you read this, it’ll probably be 25C, sunny, and North West Tonight will have Eno Unpronounceablesurname (wearing yet another outfit designed to test the colour-tolerance level of your TV) warning us about the dangers of UV exposure.

So is there anything I, you, or anyone else can do about it? Nope. The best we can hope for is that’ll it’ll warm up eventually, and to make sure we know where our brolly is at all times.
There is one bright spot though. We all get to have a damn good moan about the weather. I feel better already.

Have a good weekend.
If you can.


(This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 18th May 2012. Or 'yesterday' as it's sometimes known. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here: http://www.nwemail.co.uk/home/columns where it was retitled 'Have we got the months mixed up?' by their wise sub-editors. My continuation probably depends on comments, so please go there and leave one. A nice one, if you like. Ta.)

(Grooving to a compilation called 'Extended Seventies', a bunch of 12" versions of late 70's stuff. I just listened to the 16+ minute version of Love To Love You Baby by Donna Summer. Just nipping off for a cold shower...)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...