St Swithun’s Day

Tags

Coltsfoot, husband, Kirstie Allsopp, mobility scooter, Olympics, shoes, St Swithun's Day, Suttonford, tennis, Vatican, Wimbledon

15^th July

St Swithun by Peter Eugene Ball

St Swithun’s Day.. If it pours today, it will rain for forty days.  All because someone exhumed his sanctified body, or something.

Maybe the Vatican should canonise my husband.  He would never shift his body willingly and so we could all expect fine summers for light years.  Swithun’s claim to sainthood had involved the restoration of broken eggs.  So maybe we should beatify Robert Winston, if he hasn’t already beatified himself.  Anything to hedge our meteorological bets.

Maybe by mid- August there will be an Indian summer.  Yes, but in Mumbai, I thought.  Maybe I should book a holiday with Goa Compare, except that I hate that guy with the twizzly moustache.  He would probably be one of those who took up two seats on the plane and, knowing my luck, I’d be stuck next to him, or to the baby who cried through Wimbledon at match points.  I felt I could identify more with the frazzled housewife of confused.com.  Better singing too.  And with the rain, a similar hairstyle to myself.

I had put my shoes sensibly into the re-cycling bin, but couldn’t fish them out, even with a bent coat hanger.  I stepped back and was almost garrotted by an expandable dog lead attached to an Irish Wolf hound.

Keep that thing under control! I screeched and reversed into the path of a pensioner on a mobility scooter, who clearly thought the pavement was Brands Hatch or Silverstone.

Right. That’s enough, I complained. If it was going to stair-rod all summer, I was off to Coltsfoot to purchase a pair of floral wellies, which would probably cost the price of a Black Market Olympic Opening Ceremony ticket, but which might be covered by my No Win/No Fee compensation for having had my eye poked out by the spoke of a Keep on Keeping On umbrella.

Coltsfoot was the kind of shoe shop that kept the podiatrist opposite in business.  Occasionally one could find something that one’s foot could actually remain in for part of the day.  And those items of footwear were wellies with attitude.  The idea was to pretend that by sporting them you had a Kirsty Allsopp lifestyle with an invisible husband and a homemade house, actually produced by top British craftsmen, who indulged your fantasy that you could knit a kitchen or embroider money.  If you wore those wellies, everyone would think that your cupcake breasts were National Childbirth registered and authentic and your skip-rescued children were not so much the product of Natural Selection, as the living illustrations of a Boden catalogue.  Should you place these wellies outside on your Turtle mat, Phil Spencer would materialise and your house would sell in one open weekend.

All the fives were sold.  There was a pair of thirty nines left, so that should leave room for a pair of socks, since it was likely to be freezing as well as pouring for the rest of what was laughingly referred to as the season.  I thought Nigel Kennedy might have to revise the title of his Vivaldi programmes, as we didn’t seem to have any variation in the weather- just one big similarity and no enigmas.

My main objective was to acquire a Coltsfoot carrier- a bag whose logo was instantly recognised throughout Suttonford and which provoked a curious bowing gesture similar to Japanese acknowledgements.

Once achieved, I could allow myself to be seen popping into Aquanibble, the latest establishment, which was causing pavement obstructions from the gathering of foot fetishists who drooled over ladies who entered the establishment in order to pay shedloads to have their corns and callouses nibbled by embryonic Piranhas, leaving the aforementioned Ladies Who Lunch with flip-flop ready feet and their husbands with macerated monthly accounts.

But what was the point of having smooth skin on your feet if they were going to be encased in what virtually amounted to funky galoshes all summer?  As for additions to my wardrobe, the only relevant outlets to visit would be Monsoon, Twister or Tsunami.  That’s where those weather girls must have bought their jackets.  No sense of tailoring!

I appreciate, but cannot afford designer gear, so that is why I visit Help the Ancient so much.  Who knows?-  there may be a weather girl who lives in the vicinity- it is that kind of area.  The presenter might have to ring the changes for viewers and so might off-load some goodies from time to time, especially if she is an attractive one.  They usually find that they are impregnated shortly after becoming high profile. Then they will have no need of their ill- fitting jackets and can just donate them and live in Barbours like the rest of the not very yummy mummies on the school run.

I would draw the line at any cast-offs from Angela Merkel, though.  On the other hand, her sartorial inelegance doesn’t stop her from dominating the whole of Europe.  Go, Angela, go!

And what is it about jackets and Hilary Rodham Clinton?  What is the woman doing, letting herself go like that?  She could only have herself to blame if Bill did another Monica. But I don’t think their re- cycling bags will turn up in Suttonford somehow.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012

St Swithun’s Day

Tags

Book of Common Prayer, BST, cow, deluge, drought, Olympics, Religion, St Swithun's Day, Summer 2012

If it rains on St Swithun’s Day, it will rain for forty days, I ruminated at the start of July.  I like that verb: ruminated.  It reminds me of a cow chewing the cud.  Lately I have felt that I have four stomachs where one should be, probably owing to constant grazing, so I might have to use a thumb index to find my navel at this rate.  Cows apparently don’t have four stomachs: they just have one big one with quadruple compartments.  Probably I have one as well, though it feels like it has multiplied fourfold. Does this make me a cow?

Don’t answer that.

Some would say that my character is not dependent on my anatomy. My name is Candia. Its initial consonant alliterate with cow and there are connotations with the adjective candid.  Never mind that there are also wider connotations with some kind of sexually transmitted disease.  I intended to come clean about my feelings and then decided that I would publish my observations on the climactic chaos that is/ was the summer of 2012.  I kept a diary, with a view to making it a blog, but wrote indoors, lest it become a Rorschach blob, if I wrote it in the garden.

About forty days ago, I determined that I would monitor the precipitation levels over this season of unexpected extremes, to test the St Swithun hypothesis. Everyone was hoping desperately that it would be dry for the Olympics. The Book of Common Prayer, I seemed to remember, included prayers for rain.  Maybe there would be something about appealing for respite, so I turned to my Folio Edition and found:

Send us, we befeech thee, in this our neceffity,  fuch  moderate rain and fhowers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort..

Yes, moderate, please.

While I was browsing I saw other sections which were headed in italics.

  For fair Weather:

O Almighty Lord God, who for the fin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight perfons.. and :

O Lord God, who haft juftly humbled us by thy late plague of immoderate rain and waters…[yet] in thy mercy haft relieved [us} by this feafonable and blessed change of weather..

Okay, I thought.  All this low pressure might be subject to change. I will see if I can butter up the saint, in preparation for his special day.  Lighting a candle at his shrine might just do it. I’ll let you know if it works.

I was unsure how to head up my diary: Somethingth Sunday after Trinity might be a reasonable starting point. Then I, Candia the Candid, would keep writing, right through the Olympics and would evaluate my research forty days after the Saint’s day, at the end of August.  If I enjoyed writing, I might extend my diary to the end of BST, on October, 28^th and- who knows?- ad infinitum, or ad nauseam to disaffected readers.

First had been the Drought, then there had been several deluges. I had felt like sending out a dove, the raven having disappeared three flood warnings ago.  The Hosepipe Ban seemed ancient history.

A couple of weeks before there had been a landslide on the East Coast Railway Line and a plucky little Scotsman had commented on how it had taken him fifteen hours plus to travel from London to Edinburgh, only partly by rail.

It had been an epic journey, worthy of a Boswellian diary entry.  Fellow passengers had endured flooding, hailstones and a fire on the train –everything except pestilence, he’d gleefully remarked, in that cynical humour characteristic of the Glaswegian psyche.

Pestilence could probably have been arranged, I mused, but not on an off-peak fare, or whatever they call such a tariff on their multiplicity of mesmerising day returns.

So here is my record of the week that preceded the saint’s day and the forty days that followed.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012