All Things Are Possible

Tags

Alistair Darling, George Osborne, husband, Katherine Jenkins, Shakespeare, spiders, Summer 2012, swimming, The Tempest

Saturday.

Too darn hot.

A new family of spiders has been discovered called Trogloraptor, or Cave Robber.  One of their genus was behind my headboard last night and it definitely had claws.  This is one situation where the husband can make himself useful.

The theme of the summer, i.e. that all things are possible is continued in news items about a limbless Frenchman who is swimming between all the continents and a sixty three year old American woman who is making her 4^th attempt to swim between Havana and Florida, without the protection of a shark cage.  Last time she had to call it off as she was stung by jellyfish.   Mind you, the American probably needn’t worry, as thresher sharks have been seen basking off the coast of Wales, so they may be on vacation and might prefer a nice nibble of Katherine Jenkins instead.  Who wouldn’t?

Nasty weather is spreading from Wales towards the Midlands.  Heavy rain is forecast for Scotland.  Plus ca change.

Alistair Darling has been writing open letters to George, or Gideon Osborne in The People, asking him to change direction.  The problem is that no one knows where the Chancellor is.  He is not called The Submarine for nothing.  He will come up when the coast is clear. At the moment he would be well-advised to stay below the radar.  He certainly should resist any desire to adopt a stovepipe hat and jump on to The Tempest bandwagon, quoting:

If I have too austerely punish’d you…

…all thy vexations

Were but my trials of thy love, and thou

Hast strangely stood the test…

…be more abstemious.. 

If he surfaced with that kind of talk I think a thousand Portuguese Men-of-War would sting him to death.  And they would be of his own party.

© 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