Sunglasses in the Rain

Tags

Ben Ainslie, Boris Johnson, Coltsfoot, Financial Times, Flybe, Jesus, matthew pinsent, National Trust, NHS, Prince Philip, St Swithun's Day, sunglasses, The Queen

Maybe I’ve got it wrong, I considered. Maybe it is Ben Ainslie who is going to carry the torch.  At least he won’t be fazed by a little water, since he is practically a Merman.  I admired his full page b&w endorsement of sunglasses in the How To Spend It section of The Financial Times, with his sexy stubble.

I like cool shades as much as I like cool dudes.  My optician advised me to wear sunglasses, even in the rain, as you could still be affected by glare.  A medic had commented, however, that over-use of reactive lenses was positively linked to high levels of neuroticism and madness.  Oh well, they are cheaper than a blepharoplasty and Jackie Kennedy carried them off.  The only problem is that I fail to see much in the murky gloom of the present summer and so I fell to wondering how Posh Becks could keep an eye on what her husband was up to, if she continually resorted to those owlish lenses.  They probably don’t prevent her from seeing well enough to put in his pin number, however.

You don’t see the Queen wearing sunglasses much.  Not that she’d needed to for her Regatta thingy, when a soaking band of singers stood before the Royal party and Prince Philip had nearly burst his bladder trying not to wet himself, laughing at the state of them. The old boy had become extremely enervated at the hornpipe music, what with having been a naval officer.  At least the rain had held off for most of the day, though you couldn’t have seen anything from the bank side, whether you were wearing sunglasses or not, I’d heard.

I also wondered if the Queen was a fan of Who Do You Think You Are?  Clearly, she is fully aware of her own identity, but she might have been alarmed that she was related to Boris Johnson.  Matthew Pinsent is less embarrassing.  So long as there are no Germanic links to Boris Becker or Angela Merkel!  As Pinsent rowed by, with his back between his knees, did she wonder if he had more of the seed of the Conqueror in him than she did?  All that barge stuff and burnished throne imagery might not compensate if he had.

As for Philip, he was Greek and possibly partly responsible for their huge deficit and possible default. However, he has always shown a good example as to how to survive a rainy stint at Balmoral, or wherever.  You’ve got to admire the man’s resilience: all those damp corgis and midge-infested  puddles!  Still, the water is soft in Scotland and gentle in a good malt.  So there are compensations.  But even a stalwart such as he had to be hospitalised after his thorough soaking.  The medics didn’t tell him there was no such thing as a chill or invite him to phone NHS Direct. He’s probably got BUPA.

Water- there is so much of it about this summer, I concluded. People used to say when I was younger that I had so much enthusiasm that I could have bottled it.  Now, with all the talk of water meters and reservoir repairs and Victorian pipework renovation there was a certainty that prices would rise.  The fashionable thing was to dig a bore hole.  I could produce my own label: Suttonford Soft – straight from Izaak Walton chalkstreams.  In smaller print: culled from the countryside of the Compleat Angler.  Maybe Alan Titchmarsh could launch it. He seemed to be everywhere.  Raymond Blanc and Jamie Oliver might take a few bottles for their local eateries.  It would be good to exploit the stuff that was ruining my life.  Maybe I could light a candle to St Swithun in Winchester Cathedral, begging for financial success, and, as a back-up, apply to The Bank of Dave for a handout.  If Theo is to be let down by his investment in Dyas, he may be interested in-say-a 40% stake for £100,000, reducing to 10% after three years of unmitigated success.  The thought of Duncan Ballantyne and Peter Jones fighting it out for my attention gratifies me.  Step back, Deborah Meaden.

Hello! I blinked. I’d wakened up and found that it was St Swithun’s Day.  Perversely, it wasn’t raining-at the moment- I qualified.  I was getting into the swing of  Mark Tully’s aquatic compilation of watery readings on Something Understood on Radio 4 with the joys of The Raindrop Prelude. One had to  admit that Tully compiles an interesting melange.  He included Longfellow on the dreariness of rain, protesting that behind the clouds, the sun still shone. Yeah, right. Maybe through a Flybe porthole, but not this far down.

Ella Fitzgerald had sung:

Into each life some rain must fall

but too much is falling in mine. 

Now I could identify with that.

It was all very well for Thoreau to say that rain made us feel at one with Nature or God, but he was referring to the Spring or Fall variety, not the unseasonable cascades we had been experiencing. Yet I seemed to recall an old part song called As torrents in summer, so all this perception of climate change might be old hat after all.

There might have been something Romantic about a full-blown orage, such as that portrayed in Debussy’s Jardins sous la Pluie and something very like special pleading in Sitwell’s positive focus on the rain at the Crucifixion.  Apparently it could not dampen Christ’s love for us.  Maybe it helped to wash away our sins.

Well tried, Mark.  You must have had some kind of placatory response from the Rain God after your paeon of praise for the pluie.  You seem to have held it off for one day, but let’s not get up our hopes too quickly.

In the couple of hours in which the drizzle desisted, I stepped out gingerly into my back garden, tripping over my Coltsfoot wellies, which I’d forgotten were sitting on the doormat and which were now waterlogged.   Cascades of rotting rosebuds and blossoms required dead heading.  However, the hostas were- as yet- ungnawed.  The dispersal of coffee grounds from the trendy shop had caused the slugs to limbo under someone else’s fence, in a caffeine-induced high.

Every time I type wellies into my computer, it corrects me and produces willies.  What is going on?  I thought willies was an acronym for people who work in London yet live in Edinburgh.  Somebody is having a laugh.

It had been announced by The National Trust that this year had been apocalyptic for birds and other wildlife, but slugs and mosquitos were lovin’ it.  I congratulated myself for having given them a hard grind- literally-by emptying out the cafetiere straight into hostas at my back door.  (Or is that hostae?)

I tried to harvest as many redcurrants and blackcurrants as I could, before the wood pigeons descended.  They were not having any kind of Apocalypse now, as far as I could determine.

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

More Rain…

Tags

Alex Salmond, Coltsfoot, Gene Kelly, George Osborne, GP, Morecambe and Wise, Olympics, Prince Charles, rain, Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Singin' in the Rain, tennis, torches, wellies

It’s all about Higher Maintenance, I reminded myself as I pushed aside half of an unsaturated Skyberry Slice.  My friend had once observed that, at a certain age, it was one’s face or one’s bum.  All those Wallis Simpson types have no reserves when the blubber is really needed.  My friend’s father told me this years ago, and, he should have known, having worked on the Burma railway.

Yes, but I thought blubber was for whales.  I have tried to exercise in all this rain, but when I went out for a power walk, a woman tripped me up with one of those Nordic poles and as there is no tread on my Coltsfoot wellies, I nearly broke my neck.  Also, those items of footwear are expensive, so I don’t really want to get them dirty.  I know my couch potato, rain-avoiding existence is giving me a rear shelf like a boy racer’s spoiler, or like the back view of Serena Williams, but I don’t have her self-confidence to flaunt it in a pair of cyclamen knickers, on the High Street.

Rain has stopped my play over the last two months. I’ve had to cancel several open-air events. My portable candelabra would have been extinguished at Cringe Park Opera and my retro-look, Bisto-ed seamed “stockings” would have run at the Big Band Forties Event.  Dripping gazebos!  Will it never stop?

My only consolation is that my neighbours’ trampoline is so slippery that it is an ‘elf and Safety issue and their swimming pool has been commandeered by a family of ducks.  Kebabs and salad are reduced on the supermarket shelves.  Petrol consumption is down and torrential rain washes off the pigeon poo on my car.  The downside is that I will eventually surrender and put the heating back on.  It is okay if you are a pensioner with a heating allowance.  Then you could be a bit more relaxed about wearing out your designer wellies.  You could afford to replace them.

Rain, rain,

go away.

Come again

another day.

The hosepipe bans have been rescinded.  Good, because if any of those sou’estered kids squelch on that trampoline once more, they will get the full force of my water cannon.

Dr Foster went to Gloucester

in a shower of rain.

He stepped in a puddle

right up to his middle

and never was seen again.

It was probably a sinkhole caused by road subsidence, showing the short-sightedness of local councils neglecting the infrastructure and drains. This costs us all more in the knock-on effects of reduced medical services.  It is probably the explanation as to why, for ‘elf & Safety reasons, you won’t get a GP out on home visits if there is a spit of rain forecast and that effectively means that you will never get a home visit. You couldn’t reasonably expect the medical profession to endanger their lives- not even on their current salaries.  So, if you are experiencing resuscitation attempts from near drowning, after being rescued from your rooftop by lycra-clad firemen in kayaks (you wish), don’t expect a GP to make himself available for the signing of your death certificate.  That is, not unless there is a cremmie fee due.  Then you would see them swim, larded up like David Walliams, just to get their waterproof nibs on the dotted line.

Also, don’t expect a traditional burial in a churchyard.  The coffins all floated away in the flash floods and spiralled out to sea, via some estuary or other.  So, it looks like Full Fathom Five we all will lie. Quite poetic really.  Better than Ilkley Moor and its worms.

What can one do in all this rain?

I thought that a musical might be distracting.  But not that one.  I prefer Ernie Wise to Gene Kelly and know how Eric Morecambe must have felt with gutterloads of rainwater gushing over him, like The Horseshoe Falls.

Apparently Gene Kelly had researched and practised his seemingly effortless routine so much that he almost contracted pneumonia from dancing in his permanently waterlogged woollen suit.  GPs take note: not all medical conditions can be put down to viruses.

Probably by the Autumn, I cogitated, we will all have inhaled so many mould spores that the authorities will run out of flu vaccines and the old lady’s friend will do for so many of us that George, or Gideon, or whatever he is called, won’t have to worry so much about where all those heating allowances will be coming from. The medics tell us that you can’t contract pneumonia or flu from a chill, or from getting soaked. But surely, it can’t help.  If everything is down to a virus, they do not have to step out of their over-heated surgeries to see you and then they don’t have to ruin their wellies, or break their budgets on antibiotics.

I see a cloud.  It is the size of a man’s hand. It’s like a camel.

Nay, it’s very like a whale.

Stop arguing you two, I thought Ophelia might have said. It’s very big and it’s all over the weather map of Central Europe for August.

The Weather Girl was now wearing her Coltsfoot galoshes, not to mention a Mae West flotation waistcoat.  It didn’t matter what she was wearing underneath, even if it was two sizes too small.

Prince Charles had presented the Weather and you didn’t see him wearing ill-fitting Gieves & Hawkes.  He might be an old buffer, but he has won sartorial awards. His jackets fit like a glove, if you could forgive the mixed metaphor.  Even Camilla accepts that she is no longer a size ten, even though she was never any kind of weather girl herself.  She had other assets, namely that she had the sense never to rain on Di’s parade, though she might just reign over us.

How on earth are they keeping those torches alight- re-igniting birthday candles?  The rain must find its way through those perforations. The Greeks never had that sort of problem, though they have plenty of unrelated ones now.  Maybe they could capitalise on the success of Mama Mia and do a re-make with Colin Firth in a wet t-shirt performing an updated Singing in the Rain number.  We could donate some H2o in the spirit of EU solidarity.  Maybe they could sequel Shirley Valentine and we could send them Ann Widdecombe as an ageing Shirley, though she would probably have to be told it was Shirley Williams that she was to portray.  Still, she is fairly good at rocking the boat and would enjoy the attention.

Somewhere I had heard that Federer might be toting one of the torches.   The Greeks used to transport the flame au naturel, but I didn’t dare to hope that he would oblige, noblesse or not.  If he did, the whole of Europe would unite, not to say ignite!

I found it hard to imagine Andy trailing a torch through dreich Dunblane, even if Alex Salmond was cheering him on and the Perthshire Pipe band were playing I would walk five hundred miles, with soaking sporrans and waterlogged chanters.  No, Andy, accept it: the entire female population of the United Kingdom, minus your mum and possibly the ever-faithful Kim, carries a torch for Roger.

I felt sad for Theo Paphitis. If he was going to take over Robert Dyas, it was a bad year to sell gas barbecues.

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

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