Friday, July 20

 

 

I woke at 3:30 in sweltering, oppressive heat that felt as though a storm would arrive soon. I lay there sweating and waiting, and at 5:00 I heard a sudden and torrential rain start falling. The atmosphere completely changed within a couple of minutes and I fell into a deep sleep.

The heavy rain continued when I woke at 9:15. Irma went to collect the pictures we had had framed while I got up. An hour later, as we had breakfast and she told me about the bus queue full of people in autumn jackets (because never mind the 28 degree temperature: rain!), the rain still fell.

The rain stopped, or almost stopped and I adopted the opposite approach. I went out after breakfast and started picking the second redcurrant bush wearing only a lunghi. I felt warm and the water bounced off my body. After thirty minutes Irma called me in. I had suffered the frog in slowly boiling water effect. The rain had gradually got heavier and I had failed to notice, as it bounced off my body more frequently. When I got to the door I realised it had begun pouring down again.

This process continued and I felt as though I might feel picking berries outside in the monsoon in Goa. The rain felt warm and the wind had disappeared and I spent until 14:00 switching between sitting at my laptop writing while rain poured down, and standing outside in a light drizzle picking redcurrants.

While picking berries in the rain I catch Sunshine sleeping. He has laid full-length in a flower box that sits under the overhang of the terrace roof. He opens one eye to look at me when I approach and then goes back to sleep; completely dry, but able to hear and smell the rain.

By the time I stop I will have collected five boxes of plump ripe berries, and almost all of the ones that I have left on the bushes will look pale, hard and inedible.

I will go for a long walk listening to Kendl Winter’s new solo album, Stumbler’s Business, which sounds as though I will need to listen to it two or three more times before deciding on how I feel about it. I like it on first hearing but it has nothing that shouts at you. I will suspect, however, that it has a number of little jewels that will reward repeated attention.

We will go to Prisma to buy groceries and then eat dinner. I will spend some time afterwards cleaning the floors before settling down to read.

While reading, I will have an idea and switch my laptop on. I will successfully fix the problem that has developed with the Month view here. As I had suspected the solution will prove very simple. However, it will also force me to reread my javascript for the first time in several years, and to begin to document it properly. I will copy the function.php file into Evernote and break out all the functions into their own notes. I will start to add comments to them, as I should have done from the very beginning.